See http://wikia.pastebin.com/DF8YwGhK -- in short, we may not be allowed to change anything about the new interface, since everything may be deemd an "ad" and thus against the TOS. Could somebody dig up the statement where Jimbo Wales promises that GuildWiki won't get more ads than it had when moving to Wikia? The way Wikia is reading it, it seems more than half of our screen real estate is going to be ad; maybe we should claim breach of contract and demand our domains back. :-P --◄mendel► 23:47, September 27, 2010 (UTC)

Project:Wikia Move. I can't find a concrete statement saying, "We will never increase the number of ads on GuildWiki." However, Gil does mention a number of times that "our intention is to reduce the amount of advertising, not increase it." I'd say Wikia's intentions have changed dramatically in the past 3 years. —Dr Ishmael 00:56, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

I don't see anything in the formal contract that requires Wikia to honor any other statements any of their staff ever made. In fact, 7.1 pretty much says, if there was a deal besides this one, too bad. I don't see them promising anything except reporting on profits, returning profits to the community, providing tech and live support, and allowing us to opt-out of new features and skins. It seems to me that they haven't done well on those promises, but then again, they aren't contractually obligated. They expressed serious interest in reducing ads on GWiki, but didn't actually promise to do so. However, we have been encouraged to "fork our projects if [we] feel [wikia is] doing something wrong."

Seems to me that, if GWiki is going to see anything different from Wikia that someone would need to speak to their executives to clarify what this site's special status means today. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 01:52, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

I'll bring everyone's concerns to their attention if you all make them known here. 01:53, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

7.1 just says "This is the sole and final contract between Wikia and Gravewit concerning the sale of the www.gamewikis.org domain name." It doesn't say that it prevents Wikia from making any promises to the wider GuildWiki community, because the contract did not concern the community in any way.

However, you are quite correct in observing that Wikia has not followed through on their promises very well, other than keeping Monobook as an option (although they currently have it for all wikis, so you can't exactly say they did to keep their promise to us specifically). We did ask for an annual report somewhere around the end of 2008, but they basically told us that there was no need to run a report because we were just a huge money sink (no, I can't recall where this conversation took place on the wiki). I don't know if anyone has ever called them out on that promise since then. —Dr Ishmael 02:12, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

"In any event, our intention is to reduce the commercialism of the site, not increase it."

Also, Gil Penchina wrote:

"We DO NOT plan to put lots of ads to the site, in fact if you look at our sites, they typically only have ONE ad per page instead of TWO so I had hoped we would be viewed as an improvement. Also when you login to our new skins, the ad unit is EVEN smaller."

"I had hoped that by reducing the number of ads and improving the software, we could help make Gamewikis a better place"

"For now all I can say is that we want to reduce the number of ads without eliminating them"

So if they want to make half the page untouchably ads under the terms of their TOS, they'd pretty much have turned around on these pledges. (There are also promises about profit/loss reports and regular data dumps which have not been kept properly.) --◄mendel► 14:41, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

What can we do if we take these concerns to Wikia and they tell us to shove it? We have no leverage and no reliable alternate host. 16:10, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

That's the catch: There currently is no viable alternative MediaWiki-based wiki farm, so Wikia can do whatever the hell they want without having to worry too much about their "big" wikis leaving. There's http://www.referata.com, which is tied in to the semantic web and strongly supports SMW, but it's been mostly slow and unreliable when I've tried to access it. —Dr Ishmael 17:14, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

Hm, that looks very promising, thanks for pointing it out. I was going off of my own limited experience and Wikipedia:Comparison of wiki farms, which doesn't even list Referata.

Key points about Wikkii:

100% free, one (1) small ad in the sidebar.

Unlimited storage and bandwidth.

Advanced Hosting option is also free, with no additional ads, and allows for complete control and customization of your wiki (you even have to install MediaWiki yourself).

They will set up a domain name for free for wikis with 250+ unique visitors per day (pretty sure we'd qualify for that, but I don't know where to find the statistics), so we could be located at guildwiki.com again (Wikia only owns (*.)gamewikis.org, guildwiki.com had been maintained by someone other than Gravewit).

Site appears very responsive.

If Wikia really does screw us all over with this new skin, I'd say this is a good option to consider. —Dr Ishmael 18:15, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

That IP was me. I looked at the wikipedia comparison article first too, found absolutely nothing likable, then googled "free MediaWiki host." And it looks good. 18:58, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I didn't like the wikipedia comparison article. I also found this list [1]. It loads a bit slow, but it has some additional mediawiki options. --JonTheMon 19:04, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

Joy. They've gone and modified the Terms of Use so that we can't modify any "core features" with sitewide .js or .css.

"You further agree to: [...] * Not intentionally block, remove, or otherwise obstruct the proper functioning and view of advertisements, and/or user interface and functionality by other users, including but not limited to changing or adding javascript or CSS changes to the Service that would prevent the proper display or function of advertisements and/or user interface and functionality." (diff, bolded parts were added)

Specific examples from Sannse's blog: "It’s not permitted to remove the right sidebar modules, blogs, and image attribution or add a banner that shifts the entire content area down the page, or alter the fixed width."

I'm sure they intentionally left the part about "user interface and functionality" sufficiently vague so that they could shoot down pretty much any modification to their precious new skin. —Dr Ishmael 20:36, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

After that blog post, I'm for moving, I know Solar Dragon (WikiSimpsons Sysop) is thinking of leaving, too - so we can get traction around this. Comments? -- RandomTime 20:41, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

That's a pretty low trick for them to pull... Not being allowed to edit ANYTHING is just plain stupid, especially with all the new "features" they're giving it. I've seen screen shots of the new skin, and it's ugly as hell, and seems highly impractical too from what I hear about it.--El_Nazgir 20:32, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

The worst part, IMO, is the fixed-width. It's a good idea in theory, but they've made the width too small to be practical for any wiki with large data tables, which we have in truckloads - just imagine any of our Skill QRs scrunched into 680 pixels. Better yet, click on the thumbnail to the right (sorry for the crappy compression, I don't have anything besides Paint at work). I used Web Developer to set the table to width: 680px; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.8em;, the default settings for the new skin. In reality, the table would be even skinnier, due to margins/padding within the content section.

Maybe these QRs could use a redesign anyway, but Wikia shouldn't be forcing us to redesign the core functionality of our site to work with their corporate-committee-designed skin. —Dr Ishmael 20:54, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

When I first saw this new "skin" I thought it was some kinda databade error. It looked like not a skin, but an error. It's impractical as hell and looks ugly. Same with PvX, the skills on top of each other in the bar? I never knew I should put my laptop's monitor vertically instead of the usual and useful (and ergonomic) horizontal... Also, a lame thing to force the changes upon us. They don't seem to understand the way a gaming wiki works. Frustraatio 13:11, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

I support the move right now, but I think we could settle with Wikia if the increase the editing width so that it doesn't break everything like they might do if it works for WoWWiki. Like everyone else, I'm pretty pissed off with Wikia right now and hope to see a rapid and adequate response to the overwhelming negative feedback. --Kirbman 17:13, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

I assume I don't have allot of say in this as I'm not a mod and not an active user but I agree with mendel about the fixed widths. The new interface wouldn't be that bad if a fourth of the page wasn't lost to the four inches of border. I also support what Kirbman said above. --La Fey 19:17, October 28, 2010 (UTC) Hello Facebook / Microsoft.

Ah, you assume wrongly. For everyone here is equal. But some are more equal than others. 19:36, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

Guys your wiki is the best for this game, but as far as wikia's inclusion of ads is concerned, mozilla extensions such as Adblock help reduce the invasion of screen real estate. s for the skin looks like a cheap friendface clone :(. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by91.108.110.204 (talk • contribs) 14:01, 2010 October 3 (UTC).

Thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately, adblock won't make the sidebar any smaller, nor remove the fixed width for article content. You could check w:c:muppet: to see if it helps reclaim the space taken up by the top banner ad. --◄mendel► 22:41, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

In any case, Oasis is merely a symptom of a larger issue: Wikia is changing direction away from things that are helpful for GWiki (although they might be very good indeed for smaller, less established sites). (You can see some of those issues elsewhere on this talk and in the Summary.) —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 22:52, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

I was just about to reply that my personal views are irrelevant to the issue of what's best for the wiki. But that was before I found myself quoted at the GTA wiki. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 02:19, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

Honestly, the fixed-width thing doesn't *really* bother me that much. The hanging sidebar does, though. I am apparently one of the few that doesn't have a huge monitor and run my browser windows fullscreen, so a lot of the so-called "squished" "unusable" shots actually look a lot how I see the pages today, on my 13" laptop with about 900px wide browser windows. 71.146.73.91 14:29, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

You have exactly described the issue with the size chosen by Wikia for their fixed width: it forces those with bigger skins to see only as much as they would see using a small screen. So, it's neutral for you, a positive thing for wikis that don't have resources to customize for more than one skin/one window, and a bad thing for wikis such as ours that use bigger windows to good effect. So, it's not the skin so much as the fact that this wiki will have to work hard to accommodate it. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 16:04, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

I understand that. I can see why that would annoy some of you, and why you feel strongly that it sucks. But the reason that it doesn't bother me is because, perhaps through chance, perhaps through design, this wiki by-and-large "degrades" nicely. This is the way I believe the web *should* be. I'm tired of finding 3-column webpages (mostly shitty blogs) with fixed-width left and right sidebars, that are sized reasonably and fine if you've got a browser window 1600px wide, but on my screen leaves only enough space for about 2 words per line in the middle column. That's why I mentioned the hanging sidebar as being annoying here. In my case now, it's a choice -- it wasn't before. Not everyone has 1600x1200. Honestly, if more of the web was designed to look ok at these smaller resolutions, I would certainly have a problem with that. 71.146.73.91 07:08, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

Well people, I'm looking at Wikkii's hosting terms, advanced hosting option, etc and so forth, and it seems like an extremely reasonable choice. See Features, Advanced Hosting Requirements, and Rules. What are everyone's thoughts? 22:24, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

Look like the best that I've seen - I like the fact we can have full control over the whole wiki. The problem is getting users used to the change. -- RandomTime 22:34, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

I presume it would be violating Wikia's ToS to have [guildwars.wikia.com] redirect to the new site. 22:37, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

I think someone here should see if renegotiation is possible.

I think a proof-of-concept of some sort is worthwhile.

Should those measures prove unproductive, it's worth considering leaving GWiki and moving to GWW — why should fans/contributors have to deal with wikia baggage?

re: getting used to the change. That sounds like a call for Someone has suggested merging this page with a completely different site; discuss. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 22:41, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

I think Wikia has made it very clear that there won't be any exceptions for any wikis, period. They're not making any concessions for Wookieepedia or WoWWiki, so why would they do so for us? We're not nearly as important as we were 3 years ago.

Proof-of-concept... of what? The new skin on this wiki? Just go to your Preferences -> Skin -> New Wikia Look. It's utter crap. Never mind, that's not enabled until October 6.

What, and wrestle with their admins to get SMW enabled and redo all the work I've put in over the past couple months? Without admin rights for myself? No thank you.

Exactly - we would probably replace the main page with a similar message, then ask Wikia to lock the wiki. —Dr Ishmael 22:53, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The main difference between ShoutWiki and Wikkii is the lack of the "Advanced" option - ShoutWiki staff manages all configuration/extensions for all wikis, just like at Wikia. I can't find anything specific on ShoutWiki about their ads (looks like 0, from what I can see with ABP disabled, but that can't be right) or storage/bandwidth limits (I'd expect those to be pretty restrictive if it really is ad-free).

I say if we're going to leave Wikia to protest their restrictions of community freedoms, we go somewhere where we have full freedom over the wiki, like what Wikkii offers.

I guess the next step, if we're going to do this, would be deciding who's going to "own" the wiki. Obviously the initial contact with Wikkii and setup would be handled by one person, but after that, would we want the backend administration left in the hands of that one person, or handled by a team?

The new skin won't be forced on us until next Wednesday October 20, so we've got a little time to plan this out before rushing ahead. —Dr Ishmael 22:45, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

TEF, I balk at the very idea of abandoning GuildWiki and moving everyone to GWW; besides being a rat-infested hell-strewn bureaucracy of stupid, GWW has an absolutely different attitude about what makes a wiki. GuildWiki is people, no doubt about it. GWW is "Document the game and shut the hell up." While I am equally active on GWW as on GWiki, I still prefer this one.

Ish- I would like to try my hand at negotiating with Wikia before we start making real plans to leave. Now that we have viable alternatives, we won't be at their tender mercies. 23:11, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

Right, thus the big if I included there. I just thought it would be a good point to bring up before someone rushes ahead on their own to set something else up. —Dr Ishmael 23:39, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

I am establishing a preliminary contact with Wikkii to get their thoughts and support and to add some leverage to negotiations with Wikia. I will not be committing to anything, of course. It would be great if other users could put out some feelers toward shoutwiki and the other potential hosts as well. 00:06, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

If we need it I can provide some minor financial aid, enough to purchase enough space on some third party server to store information during a transfer for a month or two. This is not an official commitment, and it is not a vote towards splitting. Personally I would like to play ball with wikia, and only move if they are obstinate in their demands.--Łô√ë îğá†ħŕášħ is hosting a Card Creation Contest! 00:34, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

I've had about enough of Wikia coming in every several months and saying, we're going to change things on you whether you like it or not. How hard would it be to move? Is it a simple copy all the pages over? Do we lose the page histories? Do we lose a bunch of pages outright? Does everyone have to create a new login?

Servers and bandwidth aren't free, though, and I'm somewhat skeptical that Wikkii can stay free forever with just the one little ad. Quizzical 06:56, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

I share your skepticism. Though, with wikia you pay for more infrastructure and personnel than you do with wikii. We do not lose the page histories or any pages. tfwiki.net organized the move so that users had to confirm their logins on the new wiki. --◄mendel► 07:44, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Wich means we WILL lose all the inactive (old) contributers, and a lot of the once-a-month contributers. And I think also a lot of anon help, right? I don't know. I'm pro negotiaiting with wikia first. But if they refuse to budge (read, take away my monobook) then I want out of here. Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 08:27, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

I'm unfamiliar with most of the problems caused by wikia, but I've heard plenty of more experienced people swear about it. I doubt negotiations with wikia would actually work, but I am still in favour of it before doing drastical things such as moving completely. IF we move, I suggest the main page should indeed say something clearly about the site being moved to the new host, including a link (if wikia lets us do that).--El_Nazgir 11:08, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

I'm no wiki pro but on this page it looks like there have been relatively few people sharing their opinions considering this is a fairly large wiki. I'm not sure how easy/hard it would be to do but maybe a poll is order to try and get more people's views on the matter. Just a thought.GenericName 17:20, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

That's exactly why I added it to the sitenotice (the message that appears at the top of every page), so that we could get more people involved in this discussion. —Dr Ishmael 17:24, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't aware that the site notice was only added recently.GenericName 17:32, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Yesterday I sent this message to the Wikkii staff via their Contact Us form:

Hello,

My name is <SECRET SECRETSON>. I am a bureaucrat of GuildWiki (http://guildwars.wikia.com), a large wiki dedicated to ArenaNet's online game Guild Wars. We've been hosted by Wikia for several years with varying levels of satisfaction, but right now they are eliminating the current default skin and forcing a less-than-optimal new one. On top of that, they are also changing their Terms of Service to prevent modification of global .css. Because of these actions, we are seriously considering finding another host. At the moment, Wikkii is at the top of our list of options, so I'd like to establish a preliminary contact in preparation for a possible move.

We currently have approximately 160 active editors (those who have edited in the last 30 days).

We are currently running MediaWiki 1.15.5. We use a number of extensions, including Semantic MediaWiki. In the event of a move, we will in all probability opt for Advanced Hosting and configure them ourselves.

Now, knowing all that, I would like your input as to whether you believe Wikkii is a feasible hosting option for us and if you foresee any problems in a potential move. I look forward to hearing from you.

And today I received this response:

Hi <SECRET>,

Sure, we would be able to accommodate your wiki. With our Advanced Hosting you can install the Mediawiki of your choice, as well as the extensions of your choosing.

You could feel free to try us out and see if it is suitable for your needs.

Any other questions or problems please post on our forums :)

Kind regards,
Lindsay.

They seem confident enough, but I was hoping for some details about their server arrangement, total bandwidth, and so forth. How should I reply? 22:27, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Ask them for those details :-) (It would also be useful to know about their support and backup plans.) I don't think the person responding is treating this as anything other than a standard question, rather than something of more than passing interest. So, maybe it's also worth asking (again) if there's someone you could chat with in gory detail about the mechanics of a move and what life would be like for host/site 30-60 days after that.

Also, I think it would be worth asking whether hosting GWiki has any advantage for them. It would be nice if we could develop a synergistic relationship if we're letting another company host. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 22:39, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Getting details on bandwidth would be good, because a lot of places that say "unlimited" really mean "it's really, really high and 90% of our users won't ever reach it," where we would more than likely fall outside that 90%. Other details I would ask for:

In addition to MW, can we install our own AMP packages? If not, what versions will be installed for us? (They say we get cPanel and FTP access, but don't specify full root control.)

Would we be able to modify the Apache configuration at all? (Some of the finer details of MW config are most easily done in httpd.conf, which shared hosting providers usually don't let you access.)

Support/backup, like Ernie mentioned.

What about cron access? It would be very nice to have a weekly/biweekly cron job to create XML dumps or even full DB backups.

That's all I can think of for now. I've used cPanel before, and while it's pretty robust and very useful for the not-so-tech-savvy, it's got nothing on root command-line access. —Dr Ishmael 23:03, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Moving to any wiki farm requires advance negotiation; GuildWiki still isn't exactly small, we require DPL (and possibly SMW) and should probably have our own server. And if you look closely, the "advanced" option is exactly like having our own server, except that they've set up Apache and SQL for us and tell us what ads to run. I'd rather run our own server; in fact, I'd rather form a wiki assocoiation of self-administrated wikis that run their own server farm than ever rely on a business model that removes control over my wiki from me. If Giga can cough up one month's worth of root server, I'm sure between us and our users we can get the money and do away with ads altogether. (See also the poll on Welcome PvXwiki.) --◄mendel► 06:25, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Get me a realistic server cost number and set dates for a move if this goes through and you have my support.--198.199.136.144 07:08, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

If we have someone who can handle the hardware side, great! (Is that what Giga was volunteering for here?) I would be happy to help with the software side - I used to do Apache/PHP/MySQL installs all the time when I was a developer, so I have plenty of experience with that. —Dr Ishmael 15:02, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

What operating system did you install them on? I assumed the hardware needed to be rented anyway. --◄mendel► 15:06, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Mostly RHEL, with a few on HP-UX and others. I realize that we would more than likely be using a free flavor like Debian or Ubuntu, in which case it's even easier: Debian has a package system for installing everything (even MediaWiki itself, but that package is only at the 1.12 version, we're on 1.15) and Apache/PHP/MySQL are core components of Ubuntu server edition. —Dr Ishmael 15:37, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

From my experience of the desktop release, Ubuntu repositories aren't the most up-to-date. Not sure how core server tools like PHP/Apache/MySQL are on that front. This looks like a promising move, and with the power of open source softwareTM we should be able to get this running pretty quickly. Not sure how much the bandwidth would cost (and that's the limiting factor). -- RandomTime 19:34, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, Ubunutu has always been more current than Debian. Anyway, Wikkii is running MW 1.15.1 as well. Their .php and SQL versions are older though. --◄mendel► 21:58, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

That's just on their main wiki. We could use whatever versions of whatever we wanted with their Advanced Hosting Option. 22:19, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

I didn't understand their terms like that: advanced means we get to install the mediawiki .php scripts, but the server software itself is pre-installed. --◄mendel► 23:15, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

I have Ubuntu laptop distro (x64) and I've checked a bunch of the server / dev packets, and compared those to what debian and fedora offer. For the most part Ubuntu has the most up-to-date, and if its not the most up to date, its the most stable recent release. — Scythe0:05, 30 Sep 2010 (UTC)

Hey there. I'm the head of Dungeons and Dragons Wiki and a player of Guild Wars (occasionally). We're also moving in response to the Wikia changes, and we're looking to set up private hosting (system administrator: me). If you guys need any assistance or even want to share a server to push down hosting costs (provided you can't find it lower elsewhere, like that Wikkii site), let me know (email MORGON dot KANTER at GMAIL). Surgo 21:47, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I am running a root server (Xen host) which is not under a heavy load (and having an approximately 2 hits per second extra won't hurt it much, too). I could imagine creating a linux Xen guest for GuildWiki, configuring it actually in any way we need, with 2 restrictions... I would keep command line root access restricted to a very small number of persons (2-3, including myself, all acting on agreed guidelines like "never compile things from source if not absolutely needed", "always document what you have changed" etc.), and I think a small AdSense (or similar) ad somewhere on the page won't hurt. Daily backup should not pose a great problem (hourly backup for the database either). Bandwith is not limited, but will be cut down to 10 MBit/sec if we surpass 5TB/month significantly - so unless every average page view transmits megabytes of data, this should be sufficient. I would strongly vote for Debian (squeeze is stable enough, running Debian "Testing" since years without major problems, and we all know the Debian policy of declaring a distribution "stable" when most of the packages are already obsoleted :D). I don't care about having any particular Wiki rights. If you are interested, contact me at dmitri dot barski at gmail dot com. And yes, I would provide this at no cost (unless you expect me to get up at night to check whether the server is running :D). Dmitri Barski 09:43, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

I reset your indent. That's a very generous offer, and I'd like to try this. If it works out, it'll be better than getting hosted elsewhere; even if it doesn't, we'll have already solved a lot of difficulties we'd have to cope with when moving someplace else anyway. --◄mendel► 10:41, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

I'll try to set up the VM today in the evening (European evening, that is), but cannot promise. Please send me an email so that I can provide you login data. Dmitri Barski 12:57, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

so what is your resumee after 3 weeks of testing? Dmitri Barski 17:42, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

My resume is that my time management sucks. The big plan goes this:

A. Get the wiki set up on a machine at home, making plenty of notes.

B. Get the wiki set up on your server.

The plan for A. is

set up simple LAMP server

set up OpenSSH

set up Subversion so it pushes changes to a directory on the server

configure Apache to display said directory

configure MySQL access, choosing an admin tool

put up MediaWiki and extensions

install GuildWiki database

configure and test Wiki

I got to step 3 so far, in one concentrated day of work. See my notes.

The problem is that my Bureaucrat duties have also picked up; up until about two weeks ago I was very pressed for time. I got some more time after that; I stopped reading the Wikia staff blog comments; I dropped off irc (Felix and JediRogue can reach me via msn); and still on a day like today I get on the wiki in the morning, and with my non-wiki chores etc. it is now evening and while I feel I kept up ok with things as a bureaucrat, I didn't get any work done on the server, even though I intended to. I can't express how much that sucks, and it frustrates me.

I know you must feel I don't really care for your generous offer, and you're probably starting to lose patience. All I can say is that I feel about three times worse about this than you do. --◄mendel► 21:27, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

Any progress on this? Or is it of no more interest and I can turn down the VM? Dmitri Barski 16:31, November 20, 2010 (UTC)

I've been told by the head of another wiki that's leaving Wikia that http://www.curse.com is offering to host various gaming wikis with near autonomy. They host several other small-to-moderate sized wikis, and it seems to be fairly popular gaming site, so we might see an increase in popularity and userbase. There would be ads, and the curse.com banner somewhere, but that's hardly different from anywhere else. What do you all think? 22:52, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

I think I'd trust them over Wikkii, but I don't know about the ads. It looks like a banner ad at the top and bottom of every page, and the top banner seems to always be Flash. I also encountered a splash-page ad when going to the Evony Wiki. Definitely need more details on the server environment, too.

(Their wikis are linked in their page footer, took me a bit to find that, although not all of those are hosted by them - the Diablo and FFXIV wikis don't show the Curse footer, at least.) —Dr Ishmael 23:18, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Apparently the footer is only put on the larger wikis. It's determined by traffic flow. 04:09, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

"Curse.com is currently down for relocation to a new data center." I lol'd. --Macros 04:47, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, well. Timing is everything I guess. However, we would be getting shiny new service. 04:48, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I'd rather see a moderate amount of ads that looks like it could be sustainable indefinitely than too few and make it look like there is going to be tremendous pressure to add more later. We saw where the latter got us as time passed with Wikia. The Runes of Magic wiki on curse.com looked more appropriate. Well, if you ignore the script error message that often prevented the top ad from appearing, that is. Quizzical 04:52, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

The errors are because they're moving to a new data center tonight, and should be resolved very shortly. That's what I was told, anyway. 04:55, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

(Reset indent) After reading all the pros and cons of everything. I feel strongly that Curse.com would be the best choice. Not just the facts that so many game wikis are moving there or that guru is there, but that they seem stable to handle as much as they have on their system. I feel confident that they could handle guildwiki without much of any problems. I could put up with a footer and a small add compared to other sites that could leave more unsecure feelings than this one does to me. After all, curse seems to handle many guild wars fan sites and I feel that is a good plus. To me, it is better having a site that is familiar or has things on it that's already enough to be a little bit familiar with guildwars. Also, that having wiki availability shows me that they are capable of game related wikis as well. My vote, my choice rather, is for Curse.com and I'd like to offer any help on anything that I could do. Ariyen 04:13, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

Your argument is similar to the one that orginally brought GuildWiki to Wikia. --◄mendel► 08:22, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

That seems like an oversimplification. The reasons for leaving have some similarities in that both moves have come about because the old host stopped being a good fit (then: too expensive, too hard to self-maintain; now: more effort to maintain than it should be). The reasons for choosing a destination are different (then: someone paid money and and Wikia was a better-than-adequate choice, moving to the upcoming server-farm of choice; now: curse.com might be the upcoming game site of choice and it happens to provide support for wikis).

The fact that we are likely to move now that doesn't mean that Wikia was a bad choice back then. In fact, I'd say Wikia served its purpose and might easily have remained a good choice if they had gone about deciding on a new direction with input from larger wikis.

I agree with Ariyen that familiarity, demonstrated enthusiasm for similar projects, and perceived stability are worthwhile things to consider. However, I would much prefer to move to a site that sees specific benefit from Guild Wiki's association with it. That's pretty much the only way to ensure that, as the host evolves as a business, it has a vested interest in ensuring that GWiki is part of that evolution. Wikia has never behaved as if GWiki success was important to Wikia's succcess. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 08:52, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

In a nutshell (i.e. oversimplified), the argument goes "we don't like to deal with money and/or server hassles, so let's get hosted by somebody who hopes to make financial profit from hosting us because that'll ensure they'll want us to keep going." This ensures that we'll be on the losing side when the need for profits conflicts with the wishes of the wiki, and the best we can hope for is that this occurs in the far future or never.

I've suggested to Felix that he ask curse.com what minimum length of time they expect to be hosting GuildWiki, and, given our experience with Wikia, how their attitude would be if at some point in the future we decided to move again. --◄mendel► 09:24, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

Money hassles... server hassles... yeah, Mendel. Similar in that we're still a Wiki. A F K is pro-AWA! 17:53, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Hey guys. I'm Phenaxkian (obviously) a sysop over at PvXwiki (for any GWikians that are reading this and don't know what PvX is, it's a wiki for GW builds). The general feeling over there is that the new skin is....rubbish...and I'm putting that nicely, believe me. While most of our userbase wasn't keen on Monaco either (we much prefer monobook), we all agree that the new skin is ridiculous.

Not to mention that when this skin was announced, the original plan was to remove monobook. That has since been retracted, purely because of ONE wiki. That would be Uncyclopedia (i belive that's spelt correct), one of the biggest wikia wikis. Now personally I don't like the fact the only reason it's being kept is because of that one wiki. If they up and move, Monobook will be gone tomorrow. As such I think the feeling is we'd rather go somewhere that we can make such decisions on our own, and not have them forced upon us. As well as being able to sort out our own custom extension. While wikia helped with that a great deal, there are still isuues with it, one of which a user has actually supploed the solution and it simply needs wikia to copy to the relevant places, which hasn't been implemented for months.

Now of course, we've not really had any formal discussions so i can't reliably say "our users want to leave if guildwiki does" or anything like that, but for me personally, and i think the majority of the sysops, that would be the preferred course of action. ~ PheNaxKiantalk 00:36, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for letting us know! If you have anyone over there who has experience with hosting providers that they feel they could give us some recommendations, send them on over. We've got a couple "pretty good" options already under discussion here, but if we could find a "very good" option, that would be better... obviously. >.> —Dr Ishmael 03:53, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Just to clarify, we didn't (and don't) intend to remove monobook as a personal option -- possibly we said something that made that unclear? -- Sannse(help forum | blog) 21:52, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

We probably got confused around the fifth time we had to reset our skin back to one that didn't blow. I guess we just took that as subliminal messaging. -Auron 00:42, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

Each time it was mentioned the phrasing seemed to be carefully constructed in a such a way that doesn't preclude its removal in the near (or not so near) future. I think this is what has people so cagey, waiting for the other shoe to drop. --Tlosk 00:44, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, we learned a while ago never to say anything is certain, just in case. The times we have, and turned out to be wrong (sometimes years later) it's come back to bite us. So I can clearly say that we have no plans to remove Monobook as a personal choice... but I can't ever say never. -- Sannse(help forum | blog) 23:07, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

I go away for three weeks and the shit hits the fan. Just like in game. Have you ever noticed how the Kurzicks always take Etnaran Keys when my guild is incapable of ABing (such as when we're all on vacation for three weeks?) It's not a coincidence. Though I admit I have become a lurker in recent months. I'm a lurker at heart, and now I'm regressing. I still check the wiki everyday and keep up on all the discussions and dramas; except for the last three weeks, of course. Normally, as is my lurker habit, I'd stay out of this. But Felix asked me to give my two cents on the matter. I'm not sure what he expected me to say - I have nothing to contribute to the technical side of this, what with moving servers and mountains, and I'm pretty sure the anti-Wikia bandwagon is full.

I will say this, however. I'm fine with Wikia under 3 conditions:

I get to keep monobook

I get to keep my custom .css

And I get to keep using ABP (not that they could do anything about that anyway)

That's the way I feel. I'm content with the way it is now, because I can hardly tell Wikia owns GuildWiki. I usually only notice them when someone starts a discussion reminding me to opt-out of some new feature. I know Mendel and Ishy and a few others (the ones forced to come into contact with Wikia) don't feel the same way. I probably would too if I were in their position. Which is one reason why I will adamantly refuse any position of authority; that is, if someone were crazy enough to nominate me. But that's neither here nor there.

Wikia has not treated us with all that much respect. I know it's probably hard to make friends and share beers with each of the thousands of wikis on Wikia, but still. GuildWiki has been disappointed in Wikia ever since we first met them - right after the deal was closed and we became one. It's ironic that the very act of buying GuildWiki caused it to lose most of its value - its contributors. Wikia made a bad investment in GuildWiki and got burned from it. I hope they learned something that will prevent the same thing from happening to another wiki someday in the future.

If GuildWiki decides to move, I'm afraid I won't be able to help much. I'll donate some money, but I'm ashamed to say that it won't be very much. I don't have any experience with any sort of programming, and running a server is orders of magnitudes beyond me. I know nothing about running the backends of websites. If GuildWiki moves, I'll be right there with it, but I'll be just another lurker. --Macros 02:39, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

You're a darling. 02:54, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Don't worry, we'll need plenty of "lurkers" and/or non-techies like you and Arnout to thrash the wiki around a bit and shake out all the bugs after we move (IF we move). —Dr Ishmael 03:49, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I am flatterd. I am, however not your common lurker ;-) I actually patrol RC! But there is not much going on these days. Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 07:06, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

No, you're a non-techie. I've modified my comment to make it more clear that the two are not necessarily equivalent. —Dr Ishmael 12:31, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I am too, following this topic, and while I don't have very much to input at the moment, I am taking in everything that has been said thus far. It is too early for me to make a judgement call on all of this, but as was already said above, we do have time to make a decision before "the shit hits the fan". Whatever decision is made, I am all for it, and will be right here in helping wherever it is needed. Though I may not be as active of a contributor as I once was, I still patrol daily. -- Isk8(T/C) 13:49, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I would also like to add that I am (as of today) keeping an eye on this situation as well, despite being incredibly inactive here. (haven't played GW in a while, and I've been busy with personal projects and Bulbapedia.)

However, I am still available to help out where possible; I've got a bit of experience with MediaWiki on the server-side (installed and ran my own wiki for a short, short while once), and I haven't lost my edge when it comes to wiki-coding, in the off-chance that we'll need anything to be updated there.

I was never a big fan of the Wikia move in the first place, and I'll admit that the ghastly skin played a large part in my inactivity ('tis been killing my mojo on PvX as well, when I occasionally stop in there to check what's new in the meta). I've been involved a bit with Bulbapedia, MarioWiki, and ZeldaWiki in forming the NIWA, which has been attempting to keep Nintendo-franchise-themed wikis out of the grasp of Wikia with some good degree of success, so seeing GWiki and maybe even PvX leaving Wikia would be especially sweet for me; only thing that would make it better IMO is if we moved to our own personal servers, and some sort of explosions were involved.

That's about all I've got to add. Wikkii seems like a great option, assuming we maintain the amount of control over the servers that we need; Curse.com seems like an even better option potentially, although once again, I don't know how much control we'd have (although perhaps, being hosted by a site that's already dedicated to gaming, that might not matter as much, presumably they wouldn't be against letting us have whatever we need there).

I'll be keeping an eye on here as best I can (Pokémon Black and White just released in Japan, so Bulbapedia's kinda busy right now, not to mention my own personal work). But I should have time to check in here ever so often, and I'm not particularly hard to contact otherwise if I'm needed. --Jïörüjï Ðērākō.>.cнаt^ 15:15, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I've hardly ever contributed - mostly tiny nitpicky things - but I think this wiki has done more to keep me in the GW community (and likely the game) than anything else. I am all for moving; Wikia has clearly not delivered on the promises they made to the community when we did the original move, and if we can find a home that's a bit less draconian about changes, so be it.

That said, curse.com may be a better bet financially than Wikii.com, but curse's ads would be incredibly annoying to me, at least. I visited their site, and went to three of their wikis and got full-page "your page will load in 5 seconds" ads, in addition to the overwhelming barrage of advertising contained in each individual page. I'd say Wikii.

You posted this in the correct section of the discussion and with better markup.~~CerahWhisper

Hey Cerah Whisper. I've jsut talked to someone from Curse.com and as far as he's aware no such "your page will load in 5 seconds" screen/ad exists. If you could provide a screen shot of it that'd be helpful =). ~ PheNaxKiantalk 20:16, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

Phenaxkian: I saw the same 5s pause. It happened when I went from curse.com to the WoW database site (different domain name). I didn't see an ad, but I do get annoyed by automatic redirects that first send me to page that tells me I'm automatically being redirected. (Yeah, I know the redirect note is on the originating domain and it's there in case there's a delay in finding the other site, but it's not a very useful message.) —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 20:26, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

You had ABP active, didn't you? I saw the page as well, and ABP was blocking about 20 different objects for me. I didn't have time to disable ABP and get a screenshot before the 5s expired, and I couldn't make the page display again (apparently it removes itself from your history and probably sets a cookie so it doesn't display again for a certain time). —Dr Ishmael 20:48, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

I wholly agree on explosions. Shotguns that shoot rockets would do nicely, I think. --Vipermagi 15:25, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I'm more or less a lurker too nowadays, but I check RC every day and catch up with discussions. I gave a bit of my opinion above, but I can't judge the whole situation. So well... If Felix, Mendel, and Ishy agree on leaving definitely, I will support and follow them.--El_Nazgir 15:39, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

@Jio: If you have any recommendations on dedicated hosting options, that would be great (i.e. what are the various NIWA wikis using?). I've done some checking around, and the cheapest good providers seem to be around $70-80/month. I don't know if that's something we could consistently raise through donations, but I think it's definitely an option we should explore.

In other news, I'm going to be heads-down doing some major test execution at work today - got 2 days to run and document over 100 SQL test scripts. Yee-haw. So if I don't participate in the conversation much for the next 6 hours, that's why. —Dr Ishmael 15:57, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I've never been a huge contributor to GWiki (see contributions... <_<), but I've been horribly spoiled by this wiki. Why? It has got to be the best wiki for a video game, the best single repository for information, I have ever seen. I try to get information for other games, and am just disappointed because they don't have information logged and proven true on such the scale as GWiki has. For this, I both deeply thank not only all the admins, bureaucrats, sysops and the like, I also thank every helpful contributor, ever. I didn't really like the Wikia move in the first place, but so long as it kept GWiki up, I could live with it. The fact that I live with it means I'm actually fine if negotiations occur and Wikia bends its ear to listen, and we end up staying, but I'm also fine with us going if Wikia is going to stifle the hard work that's been put into this site over the years. Tl;dr: I'm on the fence, but I wholly support the decision made by the community at large. Skippster 23:44, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Another quick clarification - personal css/js will remain, and the Terms of Use do not relate to those. (And, as I just mentioned above, monobook as a personal choice will still be in place when we switch) -- Sannse(help forum | blog) 21:54, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

To clarify the clarification, Macros' original post that he was fine with wikia as long as that remained, as they do still remain, he is find with Wikia -- RandomTime 21:58, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Sannse, we'd rather have Monobook as our default skin - like our current "competitor". From your "first look" on, I've addressed the issues I have had with Monaco (speed and bloat) and received no reply as to what the new skin would do in that respect; right now I am having problems getting my blog replies through, and I have problems getting the site .css to update, and sometimes pages don't load, and I know MediaWiki can do better than that. I think I've special:supported something about the site being slow subjectively through all the included external references (or maybe posted that on a talk or a blog?) and never received a reply, IIRC. All of that can't be cured by personal .css/.js; add to it the shock I get every time I see our site logged out, which will only get worse with Oasis. You know right well that we can't go on editing the site in variable-with small-sidebar Monobook if we want it to look good to our readers, most of whom are not logged in (as well you know). Monaco was sufficiently like monobook (not least because we made it so) so this didn't matter too much; in fact, many people in our gaming community use both wikis and can be sure of not having to adjust too much between the two. With Oasis and the restrictions you've placed upon our ability to modify it, all that will change. You know, somebody else said it first on one of the staff blogs: at first, I thought, eh, we'll "monobookify" this skin and go on like before; you've closed the door on that option, so the time has come to find out whether another setup is going to serve GuildWiki better than Wikia does.

What I would have liked to have seen here (or on the AWAA forum) is a clear statement of how Wikia intends to support people who want to fork their projects. I feel there's considerable insecurity about that, and it would add to Wikia's good reputation as an open content hosting service if you were clear about how people who fork their projects (calling it a move) should expect you to react to that. What about databse dumps? image dumps? existing admin/bureaucrat rights? links/link exchanges to forked projects? --◄mendel► 05:18, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

On site speed: I don't have any firm figures to give you. But I do know that that's a strong consideration for the design and technical teams. We know very well that speed is a key factor for any site.

On forking: we will, as always, provide database dumps for anyone who wants them. The update script is a bit overwhelmed by the number of wikis we host now, but you can request a manual update via the button on Special:Statistics or directly to us via Special:Contact (the button doesn't show if someone has already requested a manual update recently). Images will probably be something you need to get with a bot (or however that's generally done). Existing rights will remain in place, unless the remaining community request otherwise, or admins try to break this wiki - that includes mass deletions and redirects to the new site. Links -- a link on your talk page to say where you have gone is fine, or a temporary notice on (say) the main page to explain there has been a fork, are both fine. Links on every page to say "this wiki is closed and moved <here>" would be removed.

On the preference for Monobook - all I can say to that one is "yep, I know". Much as we'd love to make every one of you happy at all times... it's not always possible.

In reply to Dr_ishmael's query, "what are the various NIWA wikis using", I'm not entirely positive, but I may be able to ask around (or one of you can, NIWA has a contact page and a forums on the NIWA site). I know that Bulbapedia has its own servers, which are run privately; they're tied to the rest of the Bulbagarden network, which is all owned by one guy.

Metroid Wiki and Wikirby (Kirby Wiki) were both brought about after the creation of NIWA (which was originally just Bulbapedia, Mario Wiki, and Zelda Wiki); I know both Metroid and Kirby wikis are run by members of the original alliance, but I don't know how the hosting is provided (I believe they're also run on private servers, supplied by NIWA members, but I've never asked them personally).

All in all, I'm fairly certain all of the NIWA wikis are run privately, an option I'd strongly suggest going for. However, I will point out that, first off, server stress is a big issue to keep in mind; Bulbagarden has multiple server boxes allocated to different parts of the site (Bulbapedia takes up multiple boxes), and the whole site still has occasional slowdown when new games are released. Certainly there's very little danger of anywhere near this amount of traffic on GWiki at this point (unless we get a magical new expansion before GW2's release), but still, keep in mind that we will need a good bit of power. --Jïörüjï Ðērākō.>.cнаt^ 03:12, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

If Felix/Mendel haven't contacted them yet, I'll send an inquiry to the NIWA people in the morning. —Dr Ishmael 03:56, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

So far, I've received responses from the owners of the Star Fox and Advance Wars wikis, and they're both using shared hosting at Dreamhost (it was also one of the options mentioned when TFwiki was thinking of moving to a new host last year). Be sure to return for my writeup on Dreamhost, same chicken time, same chicken channel! —Dr Ishmael 04:23, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

I received the email from Dr. Ishmael, but sorta got caught up and haven't gotten to respond to it and figured I'd post instead. I own WiKirby and use TMD Hosting None of the NIWA members use hosting together, and all pay for their own hosts, although, I have been considering approaching a few different wikis about possibly uniting to get a better plan, a server among us and split the cost. Right now I'm using TMD's basic plan, which is cheap and hasn't imposed any limits on us. But since we are a brand new wiki, this is a viable and economical option for us. Someday we'll need more, but this will do for now. TMD has been awesome with ticket submission response times (we've come to expect error resolution in about 4 minutes), and they offer cheaper hosting plans than any other. The drawbacks that I've come across are (1) You can't really ask them any questions. When you have any questions in the ticket submission form, they refer you to their chat, which is salespeople. And if you have anything minimally technical to ask, they tell you to submit a ticket.(2) Having too many tabs of your site open, triggers their software to treat you as a bot attack, and your IP is permabanned. I have no idea why, nor if this is just an issue with the value priced hosting. Trying to find out is how I discovered issue (1).

Basically, if you intend to try their plans, have an experienced tech/server worker of your own on hand. And if you've got that, you might just as well install all of the software on your own machine and direct the dns entries for a domain to it. Which seems to be an over looked option, buying/building your own server.Axiomist 03:09, October 14, 2010 (UTC)

I'm up for a move. I've been paying attention and they completely IGNORE ALL NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. If we're really going to win we need to contact other large gamewiki's and make sure they know what their options are. rąʂKƴɖooƿɭɘş 05:14, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

That's not been our intention, but you can't say much to "I hate it" when it's not possible to say "OK, we won't switch then". So we've been trying to respond to any questions (where we have answers, many things are still in flux as we continue beta testing) and to gather all feedback for the team working on the new look. -- Sannse(help forum | blog) 21:58, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

I can understand that - I think quite a lot of the annoyance (myself included) came from large amounts of criticism, and then the next staff blog not addressing any of that, and instead bringing a new "look, this is the new skin, this is the cool stuff we're doing - have fun" post. This created the atmosphere that you didn't care about user criticism. This seems to have been confirmed by the TOS update -- RandomTime 22:01, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

If things are still in that much flux that you can't even answer questions about them, then why have you already committed to a release schedule? —Dr Ishmael 22:12, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

The thing to do when you can't say "OK" is to demonstrate "we hear you". Your FAQ doesn't say that; it says "this is what we want you to hear", and so do the recent blogs. I think of other experiences I've had with Wikia and suspect that this is a problem (?) with your corporate culture. --◄mendel► 05:38, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

We've tried to demonstrate we hear you, but I don't think you will hear that we hear you right now. That's understandable with such a big change coming despite your dislike of it -- Sannse(help forum | blog) 23:35, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

We understand that you hear us, it's just the fact that you can't (or Won't, to the higher ups) do anything about it that infuriates us. -- RandomTime 23:44, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

I would go further. I would say it's irrelevant at this point whether Wikia hears us. Wikia's new direction, decided without consultation, clearly demonstrates that the corporation has no vested interest in GWiki's well-being. We are large enough (size, unique visits, and frequent contributors) to have earned better.

I thank you again for taking the time to visit here and see why are concerned. I hope that you are able to see that, while Wikia's rebranding of itself in this fashion might be great for Wikia (and awesome for certain types of communities), it creates nothing but headaches for this old school community dedicated to producing the best user-friendly, encyclopedic database about a popular game. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 00:20, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

getting the userbase to follow is another, and planning that part is probably the most important one.
Just dropping in briefly to point out the need to think about moving the community as well, Amy Awien 18:10, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I thought about that too and voiced my concern a bit above here. If we truly move, we need waving banners and orchestras declaring our move (in a matter of speech of course). Practically, what I can think of is a sitenotice, a message on the community portal itself, and a biiiiiig message at the top of the main page, and... Well, can't really think of anything else atm... --El_Nazgir 20:46, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Spam it until they bleed? Or mail users? I know shadowcrest did that for wintersday once... Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 21:19, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

The Wintersday events Shadowcrest and I tried to organize one year were an unmitigated disaster. 21:26, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Take the "GuildWiki" brand with us. Change everything here to the name "GuildWars Wikia". This will make searches for guildwiki on google point to the new community. --◄mendel► 22:17, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

If we were to do that, would we need to remove pages from the guildwiki namespace? --JonTheMon 15:02, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Move them to GuildWacky namespace. 20:16, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

TFwiki had a selective scorched-earth method:

Users were able to flag their user(talk)pages for deletion with a special template.

Most of the Project: namespace was deleted (GuildWiki: is our specific alias for that ns).

A number of "notice"-type templates were deleted (nothing used in mainspace).

Obviously, I've missed some details (so, please feel free to edit/update above). But the idea is to keep the summary distinct from the rest of the talk so that casual readers (or committed lurkers) need not follow every eddy in the rivers of text above. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 15:56, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Buying a server? How much would that cost? If hiring a server would costs (I think I read that up the page somewhere) 80$, that's gonna be expancive. I'd be willing to donate, but I'm a student, and as such, don't have much. And PvX moved to wikia in the first place, because costs ran out of hand. If we consider buying our own server, we should also consider a back-up plan, incase financial support fails. Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 17:18, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, you're right. I meant leasing one from a server farm (same idea as hosting on a wiki farm, but we would have to manage all the wiki-infrastructure, too). That was suggested when people were worried that there wasn't an available wiki farm that supported GWiki's current toolset. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 18:30, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

No objection, just a curiousness towards that page you mentioned.--El_Nazgir 20:47, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

It's listed just above in the Summary. 20:55, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Just because i saw it mentioned. Money wasn't the only reason PvX moved to wikia. One major reason was that GCardinal, and Hhhippo didn't have the time/weren't motivated to keep supporting the wiki (as in, updating MW and keeping our custom extension working and what not). I actually think we were fine for running costs with just a couple of ads (though don't hold me to that point). ~ PheNaxKiantalk 22:20, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Arnout, we have lots of users, so the small donations add up. See Project:Welcome PvXwiki for a poll I did when Pvxwiki moved; it looked like this was quite feasible.

TEF, correction: the tech support both via the noticeboard, special:contact and irc has been ok; Uberfuzzy's generally been helpful and competent in solving our problems. --◄mendel► 22:25, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

He has? Erm, competent: absolutely. Helpful: certainly. Available on demand? Timely in responding to our requests? Have we been able to engage in live support (as mentioned by Penchina/Wales)? I have had a different impression. Then again, I don't have to deal with the tech issues, so remove/amend the relevant bullet based on your understanding. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 22:52, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Timely: yes, most answers to Special:Contact were reasonably speedy, often very much so. Live support is on irc; I've used it; it's not available 24/7 though. I don't recall teh original promise, so I can't judge how faithfully it's been kept, but support is not one of the areas where Wikia has problems. The problems have been communicating changes to us, and forcing them on us whether we wanted to or not. --◄mendel► 23:00, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

The original promise is available above (partially quoted and referenced in the link Ish provided). If you're saying you can pretty much always get someone on IRC during business hours plus and that stuff always gets fixed quickly, remove the note. I thought I remembered you, Ish, and someone else say otherwise. (Anyhow, I am glad that someone is checking my summary for accuracy — it's hard to know sometimes if stuff gets missed.) —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 23:12, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Well I read every comment on this page, looked at the new Wikia format, and I agree that there should be some sort of move. I don't know much about the sites that are being considered, but whatever is decided, I'll support it the entire way. I love this wiki a lot and would hate to see anything happen to it. TheSeer99 00:52, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Hi, I'm not really part of GuildWiki community here, even though i've used the wiki much in the past, but change of the Terms of use is for me like the last drop of water in an already full bucket and altough i might not be able to move some of the smallers wiki i've created, i support de move of all Guild Wars (1 and 2) related wikis on Wikia, if their community decide to do so.

I would be please if that would include fr.guildwars.wikia but i just posted about this on the forum there a few minutes ago and didn't get any feedback yet.

Can i ask a thing ? How can the images be moved to a new host without any need for someone to manually reuploading them ?

Tulip, I asked the staff of Curse.com whether they would be open to hosting the french guildwiki in the event that we choose to move to them. They responded positively; it seems the founder of Curse is also French. You may want to communicate with them directly. 05:40, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

TultipVorlax, yes, you're part of this community. The database dump does not have images in it, as you propbably noticed. MediaWiki can import images from a zip file; in the past, Wikia have provided that. I can probably make you a list of files so that a download manager like fdm can load them for you so you can make the zip file yourself. It may be possible that the import doesn't work completely, and then you'd have to manually upload the rest; but the File: pages themselves would already be in the database dump. --◄mendel► 07:20, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Thanks.

I'm not sure anymore about this because the other founder say that all of this is stupid and that i dont do much on the french wiki... On this page (in french).

So for now, i might just leave them and let them work out alone with the problems caused by Wikia. — TulipVorlax 21:34, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that. I've uploaded two screenshots to the french wiki; you might want to put thumbnails of those up on the move page. I've tried to find a page with wide content that looks bad in the narrow space, but I couldn't find one easily -- it may be that in its present format, the content might look ok in the narrow space if one ignores the advertising. --◄mendel► 05:55, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, i dont think there is many big tables on fr.guildwars like there is on GuildWiki, the main problem of their ads is like with any others wikis that use infoboxes that get pushed down. My main concern wasn't really the new skin but the impossibility to remove link to the Special:CreatePage or anything like that that i would see as harmfull to the wikis i administer even though Wikia staff think the contrary.

I dont know if Curse already has a french community, if they find someone willing to participate, i can help setting up copy but otherwise, i'll just mind my own bussiness and work on my own projets and try to raise my gamerscore on my Xbox account and enjoy life. Lol.

Oh ! I think i know of a page with a big table that could be squished :

And maybe skill list but the tables dont begin at the top of the page on thoses.

Jaxom's problem, if i may say, is that we had many bad experiences in the past that forced us to have to redo many of the pages we had done and he fear of having to redo it all again on another site. But maybe it's also that the actual french wiki is well ranked in Google now and receive a lot of visits.

Anyway, i just published an article on my blog (in french) titled "Farewell Wikia" or so (it's in french, lol). So, i'll come back here from time to time to see how things are going for you guys but i can't do much for the people of the french wiki if they already made up their mind without even knowing all there was to know. If Jaxom think there is no alternate to Wikia, i can't convince him of the contrary. He is more or less of a good gaming buddy but were nothing much (even though he's in my Messenger contact list). — TulipVorlax 01:29, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

Pff.. Last thing Jaxom said is that i do nothing on the wiki as if i know the inside of the game as much as he does, and he said that i dont do anything on the wiki as if all CSS, JS, and other admin stuff that i did wasn't worth anything.

I think i'll be in Borderlands (and L4D2) a lot in the next few weeks.

Aw, man. Sux. Well, come visit us where ever we end up. Maybe we can find an easy way to make things like data tables function in more than one language. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 04:20, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

We have been asking where we could go that wouldn't cost GWiki much (if anything) in terms of monthly or transitional fees (and effort). Instead, maybe we should ask:

Are there any websites out there that would love to have our content (and traffic) and would (therefore) be willing to pay GWiki to host us?

I am not suggesting that any member of the GWiki team get paid. Instead, this compensation could be in the form of tools, contest prizes, and so forth. (i.e. things that would be valued by our readers or would make it easier to setup GWiki2 etc). What about the IGN or Ziff Davis and so forth? —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 22:18, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Curse.com would be the closest option to that at the moment. 22:40, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Let's get more info on Curse. I hadn't heard of them until now, but they look pretty good, and their new datacenter is really nice. As long as they give us the freedom to configure MW how we want and install the extensions we need, I think we can live with the ads. —Dr Ishmael 01:37, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Mendel, Phenaxkian, and I have compiled a list of inquiries for the Curse staff to answer. The idea is that we want to make them work for the privilege of hosting us. http://pastebin.com/fKKGFkpK is the current list, unsorted and unedited. I basically copy+pasted from various places. If you have anything you'd like to add to it, say so fairly soon, because I'd like to send the e-mail tonight. 01:46, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

0. That would have to be negotiated with Wikia somehow, wouldn't it? How did TFwiki do it when they split? Also, would our wiki userbase be integrated with the overall Curse.com userbase? How would username conflicts be handled? (thinking back to the GW-xxx thing that Wikia did)

2. Root and shell are two different things - you can have shell access without having root/su privileges. Root isn't terriby important, if they're willing to do a few little setup things for us. Shell, on the other hand, would be extremely useful - while you can do a lot of things through FTP, it's a helluva lot easier if you can do it directly on the command line.

3. I assume that's referring to PvX's build-template system?

5. Might want to make that one of the "kicker" points - if we don't get that, no deal (in nicer terms, of course).

6. How are the domain names for their other wikis handled? Did Curse set them up, or did the individual wikis have to register them? (e.g. www.theromwiki.com, we would obviously want www.guildwiki.com)

7. More than likely they've already got a LAMP codebase on all of their servers, pretty certain we wouldn't be able to modify that. However, knowing what versions we'd be getting would still be helpful.

8. "Would we be able to modify the Apache configuration ourselves, or would Curse staff be willing to make small modifications for us?"

9. They may already have their own backup scheme in place (as you have covered in #10), which would make that part of this question redundant. A cron-scheduled current-pages XML dump would still be handy, and we could use cron for other things.

Felix, point them to the quantcast links for GuildWiki and pvxwiki. (See my user page).

tfwiki had something set up where, if you tried to log in as an existing user, the server took your password and logged into Wikia to verify you're you. --◄mendel► 07:32, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Aha, I thought they might have done something like that. I'll contact them to see if anyone still remembers how they did it / if they still have the code for it. If not, I'm pretty sure I can code it myself (I've done it in Perl before). —Dr Ishmael 13:10, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Auron, the bureaucrat of PvXwiki, communicated with Curse.com's content manager, Donovan, today on MSN. He gave me permission to post the logs of their conversation- a number of the things they discuss answer some of our questions as well, which I'll summarize below.

0) The wiki databases are all separate entities. They would not be integrated with Curse's main database. We would have to re-register our accounts. (How this works with imported page history I don't know) (I also still need to look into Transformers' method)

2) We will be getting some sort of server access. No details given.

3-5) PvX stuff, they're cool with it

12 & 13) "nothing besides a 728x90 ad," but also our souls and blood signatures (may be in jest)

I'm going to refine some of the questions, remove the PvX-only ones, and send the e-mail tomorrow. Any further suggestions, comments? 05:57, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

What if you don't have a blood signature for previous unimportant reasons that, say just for example, caused you to replace your blood with a tonic of nitrogen and carbonic acid?--Łô√ë îğá†ħŕášħ is hosting a Card Creation Contest! 06:34, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

You're immediately executed. 06:40, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Please find some way of asking what they can do for us (as a highly trafficked site) that would be different from the usual. Wikia treats us like any other wiki-of-the-month; it would be good to be valued by the new host.

Auron didn't point them to the database dump; maybe it would be useful to do so.

In the IRC exchange, they mentioned that they were getting lots of wikia queries. Please also ask how this might/might not make things more difficult during the transition period.

Also, is there anything they can do to help us get the word out, so that the 1/month contributors/lurkers can find the new address.

I've just left comments on a couple of specific points, but also wanted to leave a general comment on why I'm not responding heavily here. I understand your concerns, and am very aware of the past difficult relationship between GuildWiki and Wikia. Of course we don't want you to fork, but we respect your right to do so if you so choose. We are trying to keep our communication to the Wikia staff blog as the best way to reach the most people, and also trying to resist jumping in on individual community's discussions to allow them the time and space to talk about this. I'd love you to try the new look (I know some here have done so as part of the beta program) and see how well it works, but I will (try to) limit my encouragement on that to the blog rather than here. Thanks -- Sannse(help forum | blog) 22:17, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

That sounds acceptable - I'd rather not comment on the blog (but i'm sure you're already aware of that) - and I have indeed tried the skin on community (albeit for about 5 mins, I saw no features that I would like, and it didn't run wikEd). Thanks for the comments -- RandomTime 22:22, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Sannse: thank you for taking the time to come here to respond.

My concern is that Wikia is moving in a direction that makes sense for Wikia, but doesn't seem to do much for GWiki. The content space is shrinking into 1990s sizes, some of the options that Wikia touted not too long ago are being removed, many of the things that make Wikis different from forums are being...awkwardly changed.

I understand that Wikia has to balance providing a free service with making money. I also have to balance volunteering my time where it does the most good and where it's the most fun for me. I am concerned about the amount of downtime, lag-time, and bug-time we have experienced as Wikia rolls out any change. I am concerned about the way in which changes that benefit Wikia's new direction are rolled out as if they are primarily beneficial to existing wikis of all shapes and sizes. I am concerned that features change and then aren't supported b/c staff is busy looking at the next set of changes.

My impression — and Wikia as a corporate entity has done nothing to address this — is that the fruit of my efforts will be money for the company, but not things that make it easier for me to contribute or to browse/read/learn. Wikia staff should rightly be proud of their efforts — there's a lot of slick looking stuff that's come out of hard and productive work — but, unfortunately, near as I can tell from previewing, it makes things less productive and less fun for me.

Finally, GuildWiki is a large site with lots of unique and return viewers. I would think that Wikia could learn something from how we view the wiki world, but, again, near as I can tell, our opinion was never asked about what works, what would be better, and what would be worse. As you know, any sort of Beta release means most of the core concepts and requirements are well established; at best, only 15-20% of a large scale roll out is going to be affected by any feedback. Unfortunately, the new direction seems fundamentally at odds with how I interact with wikis.

So, as of 20 October, I plan to stop contributing to any Wikia wiki. It's not because "I hate" the new skin. It's because Wikia's new direction makes me feel that I'm providing free content for someone else to use to make a buck. What I used to feel is that I was providing my time in exchange for hosting services. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 22:45, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

I think we need to accept that Wikia is what it is. But that means understanding what Wikia is, and what it is not. It's not a one-size-fits-all wiki hosting service suitable for anything and everything.

Suppose that you play a fairly obscure online game and you think it ought to have a wiki. You decide to try to start it yourself. But how? Do you know how to buy a server and run it yourself? If you can rent a server, do you know what software to run on it? Most people aren't willing to simply take a loss on hosting a wiki; would you know how to properly get ads to pay for it? Maybe a few of you would, but well over 99% of wiki users would not. I certainly wouldn't, and I think I'm more tech-savvy than most of the general public.

The huge advantage of Wikia is that they handle most of that for you. You can start your wiki and they'll run the servers, provide the bandwidth, arrange for the ads, and so forth. And you don't even have to pay Wikia for the service; they get their money from the ads on your wiki. It still takes some decent wiki editing skills to successfully start and run a wiki. But this is the sort of thing that I could do, as could quite a few of the regular editors here. That dramatically lowers the barrier to starting and running a wiki.

The changes that Wikia makes are very often made with smaller wikis in mind, to make things easier for people who aren't that tech savvy. If the choice is having a wiki on Wikia, or not having a wiki at all, then Wikia is a pretty good option. I've contributed quite a bit in the past to wikis for Pirates of the Burning Sea and Wizard 101. The game I'll most likely play after I quit Champions Online is Uncharted Waters Online, and the only wiki for that so far is also on Wikia. (Or perhaps I should say, the only English-language wiki; the game launched years ago with Japanese, Korean, and Chinese versions.) Without Wikia or another hosting site vaguely like it, those wikis likely wouldn't have existed at all.

But that doesn't mean Wikia is suitable for everyone. Wikia also has a wiki for the game I'm playing right now, Champions Online. But that's not the main wiki for the game, as one player set up a wiki at www.champions-online-wiki.com. It doesn't have ads, and presumably that player is simply paying the cost out of pocket. If you have someone willing and able to do that, it's the ideal setup for the community, really. No changes will be forced on the wiki from the hosting site, and people don't even have to be harassed by ads. But most wikis don't have any bureaucrats with the technical expertise it takes to pull that off, and that's where Wikia steps in.

But that doesn't mean that Wikia is suitable for GuildWiki. I don't know exactly who does the most complicated technical work, but I have the impression that Dr. Ishmael and Mendel do quite a bit. Having that sort of expertise in our community means we have options that a lot of wikis don't have. Changes that genuinely do make wiki administration simpler for people who are moderately tech savvy can hamstring real experts. Wikia is inclined to make such changes anyway, because they do improve the service for their target audience. A hosting service that says, here's the ads you have to display, and otherwise, lets us format things however we want, could be a lot more appropriate for us. Quizzical 03:28, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

Generally well-said. One thing to consider is what happens when Ishiy and Mendel becomes MIA due to (insert favorite conspiracy theory or natural/supernatural causes)? Whatever options this community decide to choose, it should not depend on requiring a handful of individuals staying alive in a role of responsibility that cannot easily be replaced by others. -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 21:24, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

That's a point I hadn't previously considered, but it does support the idea of moving to another established host rather than opting for private hosting. We can't be sure that mendel and ish won't be struck by cars tomorrow. 21:31, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

Ironically, if Mendel/Ish/etc were already gone, GWiki would be in bad shape on 3 Nov. The new skin is mandatory for all casual readers and GWiki isn't setup to handle it. So, contributors (and esp. technical people) here are already going to have to do some hard work whether or not GWiki (as a concept) remains at guildwars.wikia.com or moves some place else.

If GWiki moves and sets up sensibly using a well-designed css/js/SMW/etc, the presence or absence of technically clever admins will become less important...as long as the host continues to function well. If the hosting company evolves into a new type of business (as Wikia has), well, this wouldn't be the first site to have to move every couple of years to keep its cultural identity. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 22:12, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

The MediaWiki software is very well documented, I'm sure any reader with an IT background could administer it (JonTheMon and RT come to mind; there are certainly others). Ask yourself what would happen to gww without Poke? ;)

At worst, the wiki continues to run the way it does (hope somebody does backups!); with Wikia, if you don't keep up, the wiki degrades over time as it fails to adapt to new features. The strange mix of colors on the Monaco user pages is a case in point. --◄mendel► 22:19, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

and we need to ensure that if whoever is currently in charge becomes MIA, the replacement would capable of obtaining shell access. Imagine a wiki whose Bcrats are MIA and the community need to get new admins/bcrats appointed. Now imagine a wiki on a private/generic hosting service where all the wiki ppl with shell access have gone missing and the community needs to get the replacements shell access. I consider those two situations to be on different orders of magnitude, unless you use a preventative measure of constantly ensure enough active people have shell access. With Wikia, or any established wiki-hosting service, the security risk of getting a total-outsider to come and fix/tweak CSS/JS and MW features is far less than convincing a general web-hosting (or private-hosting) service that your original IT point contact is gone and you want to give some new person shell access to fix major issues discovered in your software custom-installed by the previous IT person. In other words, in the absence of the original point-contact people, any hosting solution we adapt MUST be able to recognize and give full powers to the representative(s) selected by the wiki community. That is the part where I don't know if general web-hosting services are capable of dealing with. It's not about technical ability, it's about gaining restricted access from the higher POWERS THAT BE when whoever had access are all MIA. -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 00:03, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

We're going to have at least 2-4 people with access to the server and/or the funds. They're spread out around the globe. What is the chance that they'll go MIA at the same time vs. the chance that Wikia closes down? --◄mendel► 00:40, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

My comfort level would go up by a lot if we can manage to maintain 5 d-: And this includes actively ensuring we get replacements when any of the existing ones cease to be active. <- not sure how compelling this is coming from someone who already ceased to be active... -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 00:59, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

So, there's two separate threads here: (1) what is Wikia and is it a good fit for GWiki and (2) regardless of where GWiki is hosted, how do we ensure an orderly succession of technical rights and priveleges? Mendel or PanSola (since y'all are writing the most about it) can you split the section accordingly? (You have my permission to move/copy any of my text as needed.) Thanks.

Regarding (2) as I note above, succession is more of an issue at Wikia than it should be b/c it's actually harder (as Mendel notes) to maintain GWiki as is to conform with Wikia's evolution. Wikia issues have come up every business quarter since I started being active here. If we lose the active, technically-ept ppl today, we are SoL. Most other places, once we're established elsewhere, the day-to-day need for expertise is reduced — sure, we'll want to have people with the right know-how and access, but unless the Haggis is really hitting the fan, the site won't need anything special most days or even most months. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 01:22, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

Unlimited storage/bandwidth (I'd trust them on this more than I would Wikkii)

50 GB of storage dedicated to backups (should be enough for a complete backup)

1 Free domain name registration (they are an ICANN-accredited registrar)

Tons of other features that we probably don't care about very much (a free DreamBook.com guestbook! .....who even uses those things anymore?)

While shared hosting isn't really an option for us, Dreamhost does have a VPS add-on option that looks promising. In addition to the shared plan features, the VPS plan includes full root access and 24/7 live chat support. The pricing scales based on how much RAM you need, at a rate of $50/GB.

To do this right, we need 3 VPS's - one for the web server and core wiki software, one for the database, and one for the static content (basically the File: namespace). Now it's hard to say exactly how much RAM we actually need on each of these, but based on the research I've done today, it seems like 1.5 GB for the web server is a reasonable estimate, and around the same for the database (I'm less sure of the db estimate, though). As a bonus, they have VPS's specifically tuned for being MySQL servers, and they're offering a 20% discount for using both a standard VPS and a MySQL VPS. The content server could easily run on their minimum option of 300 MB.

This comes to a total cost of around $150/month (including the shared fee and the discount). I also did a little research into various ad revenue options, and we could probably earn around $100/month (again, very rough estimate) from Google AdSense. To make up the difference, we could add another ad service like Project Wonderful, or just solicit donations. We've already had a number of users express their willingness to donate should it be needed, so I don't think we'd have a problem paying for this option. Oh GAWD I feel so horribly stupid now. Somehow I got completely confused and though Quantcast's daily numbers were the monthly numbers. /sigh Anyway, using the correct data, our AdSense revenue would be much higher - anywhere from $500–1,000/month. This is even assuming a significant decrease in pageviews due to the move, as well as very pessimistic click-through and cost-per-click rates. This would easily cover the cost of a VPS solution, and we could even consider the fully dedicated option.

One additional thing about their VPS service: you can instantly scale your RAM allocation at any time. This means, for example, when the next installment in Guild Wars Beyond comes out and we experience a surge in pageviews, we could scale up the resources for a month or two, then scale them back down when we no longer need it. The surge would also bring a corresponding increase in ad revenue, so any situation like that would pay for itself, at least in part.

Pretty much the only drawback I've noticed is that they only run Debian Linux. As noted above, Debian's packages aren't as up-to-date as Ubuntu's, especially the MediaWiki package. This isn't a real big issue, though, because we could always compile the applications from scratch instead of using the packages. I'd have to research the changelogs for the AMP components to see whether it's critical for us to use the most recent version over the Debian package version, but we would definitely want MW 1.16 (for one thing, it includes Wikipedia's Vector skin).

In summary, if we want to avoid any sort of "shared" situation (at Wikkii or Curse or wherever) so that we can have complete control over our servers, but don't think we could afford a fully dedicated solution (cheapest option would be at least $300/month), I think this is a very good option. —Dr Ishmael 04:57, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

So, I'm still wondering if Curse et al would want to treat us better than smaller sites because we are bigger. Again, shouldn't someone be willing to pay to host us? Giving us reasonable peak-usage scaling options, 3 servers, backups, etc in exchange for increased traffic/visibility? While GuildWiki isn't huge, in our niche, we're big. That should, I would hope, be worth something.

If not (or if we don't have time to negotiate something reasonable), then this sounds promising: manageable costs in exchange for flexibility, scalability, and control. (The one other icky thing about managing our own: someone has to manage/account for the money; something we don't worry about right now.)

I'm not exactly involved but I should point something out. The packaged versions of MediaWiki are a mess, there's a good potential to have issues with it and not have good support from the MediaWiki community because few people use the packages, and they aren't really well supported methods of installing MW. The packages don't even bother to upgrade the wiki's database when you upgrade the package iirc. MW is a simple php based application, it's trivial to install from source, there's nothing to compile, and you'll get better support from the MediaWiki community. The rest of the software should be fine. ~ NOTASTAFFDantman(Local Talk ⁝ Animanga Talk) 08:42, October 3, 2010 (UTC)

I just set up PostgreSQL for the Dungeons and Dragons Wiki on our new server, and while MediaWiki itself was easy to setup from source, that one was a nightmare... (on the other hand, if anyone needs tips for getting that beast working, I can now walk you through it very easily!) Surgo 18:13, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

Any specific reasons for using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL? —Dr Ishmael 19:21, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

Oracle purchased Sun, so I have a legitimate (imo) fear about future upgrades of MySQL. Surgo 14:20, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

Just another note though: it's probably a silly fear, not worth worrying about. Also I'm running the Debian testing distribution, which is way more up-to-date than Debian stable. Surgo 14:21, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

Wikimedia uses MySQL, Wikia uses MySQL, and even if MySQL doesn't get major upgrades there's still community, and it won't stop working in any case. But keep something in mind, MediaWiki is built around MySQL. It's what's run when developing MediaWiki. It's what new features using sql are first built to work with. It's what's run when building extensions. It's what's run in production by just about everyone running MediaWiki. It was only in fairly recent versions IIRC that MediaWiki even got close to a state where you could stably run PostgreSQL in vanilla MediaWiki without running into piles of bugs. So while right now you might be able to run MediaWiki bare with PostgreSQL, there are plenty of extensions that probably won't have any support for PostgreSQL coded in, and new features in MediaWiki core are not initially tested with PostegreSQL, and unless the small group of developers focused on PostgreSQL test enough, it's possible for PostgreSQL-specific bugs to slip into releases. So while I'm not advocating against PostgreSQL, unless you have specific demands that push you towards PostgreSQL (having sysadmins much more familiar with keeping it's performance up than MySQL's; having an already-built large PostgreSQL cluster and not wanting to create a second MySQL one, direct evidence that it performs notably faster than MySQL in your specific use case and performance is a heavy enough demand to make the tradeoff in favor of PostgreSQL) and you're just deciding what initial database to use, I suggest you use MySQL as that is what the majority of the MediaWiki community uses, and it's the one you'll get the most support for when you run into issues and need help. ~ NOTASTAFFDantman(Local Talk ⁝ Animanga Talk) 15:17, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

I like our wiki better than the official ones for a lot of little reasons, but mostly it boils down to "we were here first". There are advantages to the official wiki in terms of being able to host some content without lic issues, but some disadvantages as well in terms of the company having a big hand in how the site runs. But as we are talking about moving the site, it seems there needs to be some discussion on the possibility of just migrating over the user base to the official wiki. I think at this point the quality has caught up to us as far as content goes. (note: Not really saying we should do that, just that it should be listed out why that isn't being considered) GW-Myth 13:41, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

Anyone who wants to migrate to the official Wiki can do so on their own leisure. Imo, centralising the wiki content would be better for the readers, but many people who visit here just don't like how things are done on the other side. Rather than migrating along, they would cease to edit. I, for one, would cut down on my actual editing, which is already at an all time low for me (excluding hiatus). --Vipermagi 14:00, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

There are a couple of things at work here. First, the cultures of the two wikis are quite different. GWW as a whole is less friendly and less willing to teach new editors. Second, there's still some lingering issues with the initial split. Third, this will likely become a moot point once GW2 comes out, as currently there is only 1 wiki for that. --JonTheMon 14:22, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

I never really liked the way GWW displayed some things. For example, the 1..15 skill attributes are extremely annoying to me. For the rest, I haven't actually contributed there iirc, but I heard about the userbase being a lot less open from a LOT of people, so I personally have no interest in joining them. Truth be told, the community is the only reason I'm still kinda active here.--El_Nazgir 14:30, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

Erm, I have repeatedly suggested that joining GWW should be considered. I have stopped mentioning it often because I haven't noticed that anyone else here cares for the idea (in fact, there's been some extremely strong opposition). There are good things about GWW as a wiki, great things, bad things, and worse things. But those are largely irrelevant to GWiki contributors/readers considering what to do in the face of Wikia's choice to move away from being a solid wiki-hosting service and turn into something more interesting.

The most important reason for any single person to choose migration is that it requires no effort. Press [F10] on your keyboard in-game. There are three reasons to take the trouble to move: GWW is less flexible, it often yields lesser decisions to those willing to talk the longest, and, for being the official wiki, is surprisingly intolerant of certain types of players/contributors.

So, I think, on the whole, the vocal GWiki community has seriously considered and rejected GWW as an option. And, by definition, the less vocal are unlikely to say how they feel; we'll know their decision by what happens to page views/contributions 3 months after a move. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 16:32, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

A bit off-topic, but I always come to this wiki for advice, instead of the official one. Mainly because this wiki provides more details and explains things in depth, while the official just gives you like a basic explanation of words meaning etc. For example, War in Kryta article. I didn't find official wiki helpful at all, on how to start it after eotn. And of course, some regular members of that wiki are just plain rude, and you get falsely accused for things you've not intended to do. --95.237.62.114 06:40, October 6, 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to just say this. I have noticed people on there not contribute hardly and get more "privileges", because they were there first or longer. It's like the "veterans" get specialty... And those that have contributed - their contributes aren't really noticed, more so the talk pages, etc. are and that's where they get misleading information. I don't think this wiki would do good at all to merge with gww and should stay on it's own. It's done better this far. Let's not ruin that. More people care and are nicer here than there. <3 Ariyen 22:28, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

I would like to make one point in favor of GWW; the GWW community as a whole tends to be a bit stiffer, but you also need to take into account what it would be like with basically the entirety of the GWiki community also involved. It's still more or less a democracy when it comes to higher-up stuff, and while they tend to make a lot of red tape out of it all, it's not entirely impossible to make changes there.

Whichever way we move, we're going to lose a lot of people. Not many "important" people, but still, a number of less-involved members and editors that simply won't bother to follow the site if it moves, regardless of where it goes.
Unless something big has happened since I was an active editor here and the community is now a bunch of rebels, we weren't all that different from the rest of the community at GWW. We'll still fit in, and while concessions will likely need to be made on both sides, never forget that concessions can be made on both sides.

Not saying that GWW will be a better choice than Curse or private hosting, but don't discard it as an option simply because we won't fit in. --Jïörüjï Ðērākō.>.cнаt^ 17:43, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

For many including Ariyen (me), who's banned from there. won't be able to contribute at all. I like when I can help with the Traveler or things of that nature or even helping in general. Where-as there you have to do things certain ways, etc., or you get complaints. Here, I like the positive side more than anything - I don't feel that vibe there. I don't think - I know Gwiki would not do good at all there. The pages are different even more detailed here than there. Where as there, they have to have it cannon or specific. I've notice them take out more helpful details, just to make an article shorter and still think that's helpful. So, to move there is a bad bad idea. Please, if a consideration at all... I would strongly advise to reconsider. I know we'd be a lot better off doing things our way and less hard*** people in the way. I believe differently than you that curse.com is a lot better move. 72.148.31.114 18:03, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

For myself -- I could just contribute to the official wiki, but they have a primary goal in mind: Business. And that will mean manipulating the wiki to that end -- providing content not available in-game (read: Their own artist rendered graphics for gear, not screenshots of how they look in-game), their own detail about x, y, or z... and yes, the profit motive will rear its ugly head even there. Here, I contribute because I want the site to be better than I left it. There, I see a quality site as only a secondary goal. I'll pass on the official wiki. Yamagawa 04:17, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

My name is <SECRET SQUIRREL>, aka Felix Omni. I'm a bureaucrat on GuildWiki. I understand Curse.com would like to host our wiki and bolster your Guild Wars community. We're very grateful for your generous offer, but we are still discussing whether taking advantage of it would be in our best interests. To help us reach a decision, I'd very much appreciate if you could answer a list of questions and requests that our community has proposed in as much detail as possible. To ensure we're on the same page, I want you to know that I've spoken at length to Wynthyst of GWGuru and the Talisman wiki, I've spoken to Auron of PvXWiki, and I've read a log of the initial conversation between Auron and a Curse representative. We've also seen Curse's new data center setup- it's very snazzy.

1. Will GuildWiki be hosted on a dedicated server?

2. What kind of server access will the GuildWiki administrators receive?

3. Will we able to administrate and install MediaWiki to our liking?

4. Would we be able to modify the Apache configuration at all?

5. What about cron access? It would be very nice to have a weekly/biweekly cron job to create XML dumps or even full DB backups.

6. I've heard from Wynthyst that the Curse support is very helpful. What would you say are your support team's biggest strengths? What about weaknesses?

7. How much and in what way will we will expected to integrate with other Curse-affiliated sites? This is in addition to the Curse.com footer, of which we are aware and accept.

8. A small group of users have reported encountering full-page ads on Curse wikis telling them that their pages will load in 5 seconds. Such ads would be entirely unacceptable on GuildWiki; I have been told that these are not normally in place on wikis. Is this the case, and if so, what are the exceptions? What is the advertising situation like in general?

9. If we do accept Curse's hosting offer, we of course expect to be entirely content with our decision. However, because of the general indifference and even hostility we've encountered from wikia in the past, we'd like to be certain of a few things in advance. Is there a minimum term of residence that we're expected to fulfill, and in what way would Curse staff assist us if we did decide to relocate?

10. This is perhaps the most important question. Because GuildWiki is a relatively high-traffic site and would be a huge boon to the growing Guild Wars community on Curse.com, what advantages would being hosted by Curse bring us? The other option that our community is strongly considering right now is private hosting. We have individuals who are experienced in server administration, and we have the means to support it financially. Please be as specific as possible.

Thanks very much for your time and effort. I look forward to hearing from you.

I'll post the reply when it arrives. 04:42, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

I am only a very minor contributor and my participation can be summarized as few and far between.

However since you seem to want comments on a decision as important as this and i happen to work in

IT as well( no idea about bureaucracy though), I thought I'd give a little feedback as well.

I think this is a very good attempt at asking Curse.

I also think that leaving is the right idea and am strongly supporting "point 10 = private hosting" over

any integration with whatever other environment unless it can be made 101% sure that it can be kept on a

friendly base for a long period of time - and you get that in writing as well.

Thanks for your input, everything is appreciated :). Additionally: I propose that after we get a reply from Curse that we start making a decision because Oasis is looming like the a giant iceberg and we need to get off this ship before we get turned into minor characters in Titanic: 2012.--Łô√ë îğá†ħŕášħ is hosting a Card Creation Contest! 21:24, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Donovan, the Curse head honcho that I contacted, will be sending a reply in full tomorrow. He did confirm that he got the e-mail though. 21:57, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

No response yet, but I believe they're on Pacific Time. Unfortunately I can't stay up waiting for it, because I'm performing at a mass in the morning, so it might have to wait a day. 05:00, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

Hello, Felix! This is Donna from the above MSN conversation. Donovan has informed me that he received your e-mail and responded, but hasn't heard back. I can't tell you more than that, but I would like to see if we can have a chat. You can find me on IRC as Kvinna. Thanks! -- Kvinna 22:22, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

Just to let you guys know, as an old major contributor and one with love for both GW wikis I'm really interested in this move thing. I never liked the sell over to Wikia and I've been revisiting the wiki again and again just to see things go to worse with Wikia. Thus you wont be surprised to hear me fully agree with a move to another place. After reading this page fully I feel like Curse.com is currently the best option offered. I'll definitely come back to see how this progresses and help if required. I'm also willing to part with money if required to get the wiki to a suitable place, but that will most likely not be required as I don't see private hosting as a superior possibility when compared to these other options; mainly due to the risks involved. -- (gem / talk) 22:30, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

Dr ishmael and I talked to a Curse representative and their content manager today; they answered all the questions listed above. I'm just uploading the convo to tinypaste because I'm too lazy to snip it apart, but here's a summary: Curse is awesome and we need to move there.

They already host a site that gets 250 million daily pageviews, so even though we're 10x more popular than any of their other wikis, we're still nothing compared to their overall traffic.

They know what they're doing with wikis.

They will give us full autonomy on our wiki (no root/cron access, but those ain't super important anyway).

If we somehow end up generating income for them, they will re-invest it into the wiki - they've already done this with another wiki, so it's not an empty promise (unlike Wikia, who promised the same thing but never delivered on it).

Guru's already there, PvX is going live on Friday (if I interpreted Donovan correctely), and they are looking into developing some integration between the three of us, so we might be able to reclaim a good chunk of the Guru audience.

They only require the Curse.com footer and 1 banner ad to be displayed. Considering my best estimates for private hosting would've required 2 ads, this is very nice.

That covers all the major points, I think. —Dr Ishmael 01:25, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

I'm liking the details as well. Are we there yet? (not to mention I just got one of those fucking annoying "you've got new messages!" notices that turns out to be a Wikia notice, and it's telling me that Wikia's new look is ready for me, too.) --Jïörüjï Ðērākō.>.cнаt^ 07:52, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

"Donovan: wikis actually LOSE money for us"

That makes me nervous. Wikia, of course, hosts wikis and does nothing else. Curse.com has other things that they can try to make money off of. But what happens when some executive comes along and says, hey, we're losing money on these wikis and have to change that? Rather than making money on market A and losing money on market B, a business would typically prefer to make the same money on market A as before, while pulling out of market B.

One would, of course, prefer fewer ads rather than more. But with a given amount of ads, one would prefer that the host be making good money and not want to screw up the relationship rather than be losing money and feel pressure to change things to add more ads.

Still, even if curse.com does decide to push more ads on us, at least they would probably only go more ads, and not make random skin changes like Wikia does. That by itself would be an improvement.

Even so, just showing up in the curse.com footer could be beneficial. Though it would be nice to get a link from Guild Wars Guru, too (and we would, of course, reciprocate).

A valid concern, and one that we'd have at pretty much any "free" wiki farm. Wikkii and ShoutWiki can't be making very much money off of a single ad, either (although their hardware probably isn't as expensive as Curse's). The current business culture at Curse, though, is basically "we're all gamers" and "we realize how important wikis are" to the community (direct quotes form Donovan). Other than possibly having to add another ad, I doubt we'd have to worry about any serious changes unless Curse has a major management turnover or gets bought out. —Dr Ishmael 12:53, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

The wikis on curse are such a tiny tiny tiny percentage of their total traffic (less than .1% at the very most) that I don't think they're concerned about making money off them. There are ideas for partially integrating GWGuru with PvX (and potentially GuildWiki) that Donovan mentioned; I'll have to get the specifics at some point. 13:30, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

Two days later, seems like there's no real opposition to Curse. I say Felix takes the next steps to get us set up over there. —Dr Ishmael 23:28, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

I would like to wait for mendel to finish setting up the test server. Although with Oasis gone live and Wikia breaking current skins every day, it would be nice to progress. 23:29, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

Bad as it is here, making sure that everything works technically at Curse is smart. (Oasis has provided a good counter-example of how not to roll things out, at least as far as this wiki is concerned — I suppose other sites w/o so many customizations might not be as bothered.)

It also isn't horrible if we can learn something from watching PvX move (not suggesting that things will go SNAFU, but nothing ever goes so perfectly that it can't be done better the second time.) —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 02:32, October 14, 2010 (UTC)

Everything seems very solid in this and it looks like both Felix and Ishmael did their homework well for us. This looks like the best possible move for us at this point, and to be re-affiliated with PvX and Guru again will definitely be a boost for us. I am all for it at this point, and don't see anything negative as of yet, save the examples given by Quizzical (and the followup from Ish and Felix). I think we have nothing to loose, and everything to gain at this point. Let me know if any help will be needed in the transitionary phase, and I will be here to lend aid. The south wiki shall rise again! -- Isk8(T/C) 02:51, October 14, 2010 (UTC)

"making sure that everything works technically at Curse is smart." If you're referring to the "test server" that Felix mentioned mendel working on, that isn't at Curse. It's the one offered by Dmitri someone way up on this page. I think we should get set up at Curse so that we can test things out there, not on some other server with a different configuration. —Dr Ishmael 03:09, October 14, 2010 (UTC)

Waiting for PvX to move first (from what I understand, they're getting set to do so soon?) seems like a good option; first off, it gives us a chance to see how well the integration goes, and secondly, moving is much more likely to go smoothly if we don't have two rather large wikis moving at once. --Jïörüjï Ðērākō.>.cнаt^ 15:03, October 14, 2010 (UTC)

Last I heard was that Curse are installing our stuff and importing the database (we confirmed the move a while ago, curse are just sorting it out atm basic =p). I can't give you a specific date, but i'd say tommorow (Friday) is a good a guess as any. ~ PheNaxKiantalk 21:44, October 14, 2010 (UTC)

On that note, do you guys (PvX) still own your own PVXwiki.com domain? And for that matter, do we (GuildWiki) still own the old GuildWiki domain? 'twould be awesome if we could have both of those back in action, either for the sites or redirecting to the sites. --Jïörüjï Ðērākō.>.cнаt^ 17:07, October 16, 2010 (UTC)

guildwiki.com has been owned by a domain squatter since 2005. I tried contacting them, and they want five figures (that's $10,000+) for it. guildwiki.net/org and guild-wiki.com/net/org are all owned by User:MartinLightbringer(CS), who I contacted last night to see if he could make them to point to Curse once we move (they all currently display a generic domain-parking page). If he doesn't respond, or if for some reason he doesn't want to let use them (his reason for registering them in the first place was to save them from squatters, so I'm pretty sure he'll agree), we'll have to come up with something else. —Dr Ishmael 17:35, October 16, 2010 (UTC)

I received a response from Martin today, and whaddaya know, Curse had already contacted him about acquiring one of the domains (he didn't specify which one, but the rest of his email makes me think it was guild-wiki.com). However, he hasn't heard from them in a few days, so he's not sure if that sale is going to go through. [edit] It was guildwarswiki.com, which we told Curse we didn't want due to confusion with the official wiki. Which explains why they broke off negotiations with Martin.

He did make an offer to us, though, to sell us the guildwiki.net/org domains, as he'd "like to see [them] go back to [their] original purpose." Unfortunately, he doesn't want to just give them away, as he's currently making money off of them through Google's domain parking service. He didn't give any exact figure, just saying, "make a reasonable offer and I'll strongly consider it." I have no clue what he would consider "reasonable," but I'm not very optimistic that we'd be able to raise enough money to satisfy him. I've asked him if he could give us a better estimate of what he's looking for, so we'll see what he says. [edit] He says "something in the hundreds" would be comparable to the offer that Curse had made. He'll sell us all 7 of his domains (guildwiki.net/org, guild-wiki.com/net/org, guildwarswiki.com/org) if we can raise $1000.

What does anyone else think? Having an actual "guildwiki" domain would be the best option for us, and if we can own it instead of Curse, that would be even better. I know a number of people had volunteered to donate money towards paying for our own private hosting, but how much would anyone be willing to put towards buying our own domain name? —Dr Ishmael 16:36, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

I fully support this if we get together enough, but sadly, the student's life is a poor one :/ --El_Nazgir 18:54, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

Register a trademark, I say. Who drives traffic to that domain? Martin's been making money off guildwiki, and wants to make even more. That's ok when selling to curse, but I don't feel that's fair towards the community. --◄mendel► 19:05, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

That costs ~$300 just for the application, plus possible legal fees, and there's no guarantee that it will be accepted. —Dr Ishmael 19:28, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

It's less than $1000, and it gets us rights to all GuildWiki domains. --◄mendel► 19:57, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't be terribly upset if Curse bought the domains for us. 21:56, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

^ That was going to be my next comment, thought of it as I was driving home. We would lose some freedom, in that we would face this same domain-name dilemma (with even fewer options) if we ever decided to leave Curse in the future, but frankly, that scenario is extremely unlikely.

Also, a trademark application would take a minimum of 3 months to be registered, and most likely longer than 6 months. I don't think we can wait that long. —Dr Ishmael 22:04, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

We could also be disgustingly unethical and allow Curse to buy the domains while we file the trademark. 22:22, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

Here's what seems good to me- have Curse buy one domain (say guildwiki.net), and let Martin hold onto the others; then, if a need to leave Curse arises, we'll have plenty of options left. 09:01, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

I say tell them to get either guild-wiki.com or guildwiki.org. For the first, anything .com would be great, simply because .com is the TLD that everyone knows. For the second, I can still remember using guildwiki.org from the pre-Wikia days, so it "feels" good to me. —Dr Ishmael 19:02, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

I checked with Donovan, and Curse does insist on owning whatever domain name we end up using. My preference is guildwiki.org as well. 21:45, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

I also agree with the general consensus on this. guildwiki.org was my baby too when I first came here. -- Isk8(T/C) 21:55, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

Alrighty then, sounds like consensus to me. Felix, tell Donovan to set us up with guildwiki.org. —Dr Ishmael 03:26, October 22, 2010 (UTC)

Nothing's going to happen until Blizzcon is over, so we may as well discuss this a tiny bit more. 04:00, October 22, 2010 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Out of curiosity, what's it cost to register a domain? ~25 bucks or so, right, plus the yearly renewal? Seems a little dodgy for someone who's supposedly concerned about the community to want to make a profit off of the move. Like mendel, my first instinct would be to tell him to pound sand, but I guess there aren't any other decent options. That said, I do like guildwiki.org for the new domain. jimbo321talk 07:50, October 22, 2010 (UTC)

While I'm a bit miffed that he's essentially making money off guildwiki's name, I think it's fair that he ask for some compensation. He has maintained those domains for about 5 years after all. 19:36, October 22, 2010 (UTC)

He's making money off the traffic we are generating, with essentially no effort to himself. Capitalism at its finest. This money should have been more than ample to compensate Martin for maintaining the domains; in fact, if there wasn't that income flow, the domains wouldn't be that valuable. $1000 for all seven domains is a very fair price considering the income these domains are likely generating, if it wasn't our content that was generating it. In fact, if we ran interstitial ads on all but the main domain, we could probably recoup some of these costs in time, and have a better state of affairs than we do now. --◄mendel► 01:45, October 23, 2010 (UTC)

More or less. Let's figure out our domain situation and go from there, shall we? 08:47, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

Hm, seems surprising that Curse already made it live, even though they don't have any extensions enabled yet. We should make sure that when we move, they don't let the site go live before we're ready. —Dr Ishmael 19:05, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

They're doing it right now. There was a little bug in the DB import and they had to start over. We're around 30 hours away from the site being complete. KarateJesus03:22, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Still, why didn't they install the extensions first? If they had a good reason for doing so, we'd like to know, because otherwise we're going to make sure the extensions get installed before we begin running import_dump. And we're also going to make sure that the database stays locked until the import is complete. —Dr Ishmael 03:32, October 22, 2010 (UTC)

A thought occurs... Uncyclopedia gets to keep monobook, based largely on the size of business they conduct with their host.

If, and I'm just saying, "If", you were to move to a hosted server where the host saw the Guildwars wikia community as the "our largest customer ever", you could expect more flexibility from the hosts. You'd be in a better position to negotiate root access, ad-usage, etc. In short, they would be hard pressed to say "No" to reasonable requests from their largest set of customers. If instead you move to a large host where you are just one of twenty dozen two-bit customers, your negotiation power is about nil. Don't like the ads? Well tough! There are some risks with the smaller host (what if they go under? What if they get bought out? etc?). Going under can't be helped much, but the bought out bit can be helped to an extent if you get things in writing, which just about nets the best of both worlds...better contracts from the signup deals with a small hosting company, but large business hosting, so little worry about bandwidth problems (Assuming said contracts arn't nullified in the buyout...).

Just my two cents, for whatever they are worth. Yamagawa 06:24, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

See w:c:simpsons:Forum:Moving Forward. Quote: all admins on this wiki are welcome to have their rights back, if they are willing to use them for the good of this wiki. That includes not setting notices that are basically an advert for their competitive site.

I posted my own take of Wikia's stance on wikis that move there as well. --◄mendel► 10:24, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

It sounds like the Simpsons wiki is going to see some admins move and some stay. If only part of the community leaves, then of course Wikia isn't going to merely want to be a redirect to the other site.

But what if all of the admins leave? What if we unblock everyone, unprotect everything, and basically tell Wikia, you want to keep vandals out? Do it yourself. Have fun.

And here's an idea: make a template for the pages that the new skin breaks and say, Wikia broke this page, but here's a link to what it's supposed to look like. We moved to a new host rather than fixing it. Either fix this page yourself or come join us. Use it kind of like a "cleanup" tag. And only put it on the pages that the skin really did break, such as the skill comparison pages.

We could probably post a lot of notes on the talk pages of individual users saying, hey, we've moved, you can stay on an abandoned wiki if you like, or you can come join us. Only post that on the user talk pages of contributing editors. If the people who contribute to the wiki come with us, then GuildWiki will be just as good whether people who only read come along as well or not. Wikia cares more about the latter group of people, as that's where most of the page views come from. Quizzical 16:26, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere (maybe on WikiSimpsons or PvX) that someone already tried a full de-blocking on another wiki that moved, and Wikia moved pretty quickly to undo it and permaban him. So that's probably a no-go.

I don't see how they could complain about a "broken/cleanup" notice, since it's not on every page. Good idea there.

Going by the results of Special:ListUsers (which has had a major functionality overhaul since I last used it - it's now all Ajax-shiny and stuff), there are ~450 users with contribs(alltime) >= 5 and contribs(6 months) >= 1. Cutting it down to contribs(alltime) >= 1, the total goes up to ~650. If I (or someone else) could find a way to easily grab just the usernames out of the Ajax results there, it would be simple to write a bot script to post on all their talk pages. —Dr Ishmael 17:05, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

I like Doc Ish's idea.

Wikia has a fair point, even if their execution of it is unfair. It's not reasonable to expect the company paying for the servers will allow a site to be turned into a massive redirect to some place else. On the other hand, they aren't really supporting a "fork" if they aren't allowing some type of general notice to appear prominently, at least for a few months.

I think a fair compromise would be that:

Wikia should allow a neutral site notice, that recognizes the existence of a massive upheaval and offers the community the option to see where others have gone.

This wiki should decide its own fate, absent those of us who no longer support Wikia.

This wiki should be allowed to post notices that a particular page is temporarily borked while it is adjusted to the new skin.

Wikia allows to post a specific note on as many as 1000 user pages, if we choose.

If we leave this wiki a complete mess, Wikia will step in and take over. And they would have cause. If we leave this wiki relatively in good shape, Wikia should have no reason to stomp all over it without regard for the community's preferences. I don't like how Wikia approached their concerns with Simpsons-wiki (nor how the company acted), but I understand why they think it was appropriate. —Tennessee Ernie Ford(TEF) 17:12, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

Quizzical, Wikia are not going to redirect the wiki even if all the "staff" leave here. That's happened on Transformers wiki 2 years ago, and it didn't work then; and I am reading Sannse's statements on Wikisimpsons to mean it's not going to work that way now. However, feel free to ask her (I suggest her central talkpage).

Mass unblocking vandals was done on transformers wiki, and it didn't have any effect. Discussing this is not worth the effort, whatever the motive.

If Wikia wants to forbid "unauthorised advertsing", contrary to a wiki founder's and adminship consensus, then it stands to reason that Wikia is really running the wiki, and the community is working for Wikia. In that case, the wiki would be seen to be controlled by a commercial entity, and that means the CC BY-NC-SA licensed content can't stay here. (This affects PvXwiki as well.) The remaining community (or Wikia) have the option to raze the whole wiki, change the license, and copy GWW over.

Redirecting: the cost of redirecting itself could easily be offset by an interstitial ad on the redirect page. However, not having the content any more will cost Wikia google rank, and eventually traffic (and thus revenue). --◄mendel► 17:57, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

We aren't out to take down Wikia or guildwiki@wikia, we are trying for a peaceful and note unworthy move. Other wikis have decided to be vindictive about this and Wikia made it fairly clear that they can still lord over them completely. I agree with the neutral notice, the user pages, and the template for skin induced damages, but there is no call to intentionally sabotage the current wiki.--Łô√ë îğá†ħŕášħ is hosting a Card Creation Contest! 18:38, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

I'm not saying to intentionally sabotage it. I'm saying that without active people keeping things in line, a wiki will degrade with time. We're all aware that vandals show up from time to time. What happens if no one is around to revert and ban them? I've seen abandoned wikis that were taken over by spammers who would post commercial links at the top of pages and leave the rest of the content untouched.

There's the same issue with protected content. What if no one who still is around here has access to modify protected pages? What happens when relevant templates need to be changed and no one can do so? What happens when the main page needs to be changed and no one can do so? Unprotecting all pages isn't a form of vandalism; it would be necessary for the wiki to remain functional.

I'm not saying to turn the whole wiki into a redirect. What I'm saying is to leave the content in place, but put enough notices around that people know that there has been a fork. Let people choose whether they want to stay here or go wherever we go.

My guess is that eventually, Wikia will pick a few people who want to hang around and make them admins, if all of the active admins leave. Actually, if new admins want to destroy all links to the new site and ban everyone who left, it could be a problem. Quizzical 20:26, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

I believe Wikia has a policy that allows someone to "adopt" an abandoned wiki. If the wiki is in pretty bad shape, and all the admins are gone, someone can petition Wikia to make them an admin. Either that or someone gets the attention of the old bureaucrats - Entropy did just that after the original Wikia move. With enough notices saying where we've gone, it shouldn't be too hard. Revoking all permabans and unprotecting all pages will make it look like we're intentionally trying to sabotage it, regardless of the actual effect it will have. --Macros 02:19, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

One thing you will need is the support of the general community. That's not going to happen if you resort to childish, petty acts such as vandalsim, even if they are subtle (not that unblocking all the vandals would be subtle...) If you have the support of the community, and especially the contributing community, you can survive the move. A couple ways I see to do this. Make known through other sites the move is occurring (gwguru? your own alliance boards, etc.) Get that word of mouth out there. Explicitly notifying all the contributors is one, and if you have past policy of giving notices to users by posting to their talk page, then I see no way to object to it. Be sure to link to a page that states your reasons for the move in simple, clear, and specific terms. A simple "They are forcing a new skin on us so we're moving" won't suffice. Make it clear what it is with the skin. My own objections include "Forcing the new site changes constitutes a violation of previous agreements". "Parts of the site changes are either suited for media formats not common with the wiki, or are targeted at increasing ad space -- neither is to the benefit of the wiki", and "it appears they are trying to rebrand the unofficial guildwars wiki as the wikia guildwars wiki, as one of a subset of many other that wikia also owns." And yes, I do mean the word "owns". If we are not free to take the information with us, and are unable to leave nothing behind, that clearly means they have a valid ownership claim to it. Plain and simple, Wikia is asserting their ownership of it (with possible copyright concerns...). Also, don't use the term skin in the general declaration. Some people will know what that is, it'll confuse others. Above all, don't alienate the support base. Don't become the "mad hacker terrorist" nobody wants to associate with -- accomplish that, and everyone will shun your work. That means hands off those ban lists, the delete bots, and the template 'tweaks'. Yamagawa 04:08, October 23, 2010 (UTC)

We're not looking for vandalism. After the move, I'm planning an orientation phase on GuildWars Wikia where we'll take stock of who's left of admins and such, and then we'll have to decide how to best take advantage of the more "casual user"-oriented interface features that the New Look offers, and that GuildWiki has been reluctant to embrace so far.

You're right in observing that we do need a big publicity effort to advertise the fork to the community, and failing an advertising budget, it needs to rely on word of mouth, with as many mouths as we can get. --◄mendel► 05:11, October 23, 2010 (UTC)

My main point here is don't burn the bridges, cause the public doesn't like arsonists. My quiver has a number of arrows, and I'm saving the extra-pointy ones for the new server, wherever that is, as that's where they will do the most for the community. Look forward. While you have all already done great things, even greater things await. Yamagawa 08:48, October 23, 2010 (UTC)

I think you're overreacting a bit. No one here has suggested that we should vandalize the wiki, or anything of the sort, when we move. —Dr Ishmael 19:05, October 23, 2010 (UTC)

User talk page notices of various random things is a longstanding policy of Wikia, even if it hasn't been explicitly done by the users and admins here. If you've used Wikia for a while, surely you've noticed how often you get the new message on your talk page notice alerting you to some random announcement from Wikia that you don't care about in the slightest. Quizzical 19:39, October 23, 2010 (UTC)

I can live with overreacting. I prefer that to under-reacting. Yamagawa 22:42, October 23, 2010 (UTC)

Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 §4.c You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

By preventing the dissemination of knowledge that the content of this wiki is available in another location, with the reasoning that we are "advertising a competitive site," they are directing the use of this wiki toward their immediate commercial advantage. —Dr Ishmael 04:29, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, that's the crux - thanks for digging that quote up. It means that Wikia can't publish GuildWiki - it would be primarily for their own commercial advantage. So the deal used to be that we publish GuildWiki on Wikia, because we don't profit from it, and Wikia is just our agent, getting compensated by the ad revenue. However, if Wikia regulates starts to regulate what we can or cannot publish, then the publisher is really Wikia, and the copyright license is void. --◄mendel► 05:17, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

On the other hand, if Wikia effectively said, we don't care what the copyright license says, we're going to do what we want to do, what would happen to them? Even if it were a completely open and shut case that Wikia were in the wrong (which it isn't), how would it be enforced? Quizzical 06:34, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

We could sue, presumably. 06:37, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

We could ask the EFF for advice. --◄mendel► 12:38, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

Sannse, you argue that keeping the wiki open is "for the benefit of any remaining community, and for any future community." All of the wikis who are moving are arguing that it is for the benefit of exactly these people to point them to where the experienced editors are who have built a successful wiki, and it's hard to argue against that. (And in fact, you don't.) Wikia refuses to redirect wikis, thus "splitting" the community, which leads to duplicated efforts. This is not beneficial to editors.

The benefit lies in the fact that by not redirecting, Wikia "keeps" the traffic associated with the wiki, and the consequent ad revenue. Since Wikia invests in its wikis, providing the infrastructure and tech support needed to set them up, it is reasonable for you to recoup some of these cost even if the wikis you helped set up decide to move elsewhere. On the other hand, while you are getting money, the wiki editors have worked for free, and thought they would be getting "their" wiki; claiming all of the benefit of the traffic so created for yourself disowns all of your editors. These interests ought to be balanced; however, if you never admit to your true motivations, it is impossible to come to an agreement. Instead, Wikia comes across as dishonest or even evil (to some people).

I should add that compared to other Web 2.0 sites who see user contributions as a free resource, Wikia is determinedly less "evil", since those sites own our content. Wikia at least allows us to take the content we created to use it elsewhere - try that with any cheezburger site or similar!

Yes, the benefit to Wikia in the short term is the traffic to the wiki. But the long-term hope is for a revived community. We know very well that a wiki needs an editing community, that's why we put so much in to supporting and attracting editors to Wikia -- and why we show so few ads to logged in users. But obviously we are going to focus on any community, however small or inexperienced, that is on Wikia. If someone on Wikia wants to edit an article on Guildwars, I'm not going to say to him "you can't do that here, go away", I'm going to make sure that his experience here is the best I can make it. -- Sannse(help forum | blog) 05:00, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

I am disappointed by the response; I feel that her definition of "community" is nothing but "people who edit for Wikia", and that's sad. She doesn't accept or acknowledge my view of "community" and refuses to comment on it. In that, she comes across to me as if she said, if you don't edit on Wikia we don't care about you. For a company that lives off hosting communities, I would have hoped they would demonstrate that they understand us better than that.

Btw, the original exchange was about PvXwiki not being allowed to advertise their new location on their Wikia wiki. Sobering reading, that. --◄mendel► 11:07, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

Not liking that one bit. It's a "yah, build what you want, but if you ever want to take it down or move, you can't". Nevermind we can take the files. If we can't direct users to a new site (This Page Has Moved), how else do we make known that a new/replacement site exists? I don't suppose we could buy advertising @ wikia to advertise the site elswehere? It's clear wikia wants $$. It's clear we want the community to survive. Perhaps there can be a middle ground where both parties are happy? I do have a 'failing that...' plan in mind however. Might not work great, but I expect it'll be hard for Wikia to counter it through legal or other means. Yamagawa 01:23, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

Just to clarify, my definition of "community" is much wider. My definition of "the community that it's my job to support and try to make happy" is limited to those on Wikia. That's not to say I don't care about other communities - I'm a member of some of them. But that's not really what we are talking about here -- Sannse(help forum | blog) 06:46, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

I apologize if I've failed to make clear that I've been referring to you in your Wikia function alone.

I'm not certain I've completely understood your reply. It translates to me as Wikia saying, "we realize that communities exist, but screw them if they've left here" (keep their content and hog their google rank). Changing hosting is a fact of life for any long-running website. When people ask me for advice where to found their wiki, I tell them about this (I've started my own most recent wiki project elsewhere), and I suspect the number of people who do likewise has risen sharply in the past few weeks. (If you make slashdot again, that could be even more negative publicity.) It's a pity because Wikia has many unique features that help a wiki get started and keep running. I am disappointed that this policy seems to make business sense to Wikia.

That said, I'm happy that you reversed yourself on the PvXwiki demotions. It looks like a step in a good direction. --◄mendel► 10:48, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

No, I think your definition of a wikia community is limited to a army of editors that work for free to support wikia's commercial enterprise. Keep in mind that CC-by-nc-sa license does not allow wikia to commercialize the content on this wiki, so that's something you'll have to think about. Right now I'm detecting google adsense, and quantcast trackers on this site. --Lania Elderfire 20:23, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

There is no such thing as the good of the "community" at that level of abstraction. There is only the good of particular members of the community. Surely keeping a wiki's move secret from those who use it does not benefit the users.

Wikis are created for the benefit of their users, and not the other way around. A wiki that does not benefit its users has no good reason to exist. It is important never to forget that, as tremendous harm has been done by leaders acting in the name of the good of the community or "the people" without considering the impact of the actions on the particular individuals who are theoretically supposed to benefit.

Of course, that's not relevant in this case at all. This is a much simpler situation. Sometimes Wikia has to do what is best for Wikia, no matter how harmful it is to their users. That's nothing more than a cold business reality, and being forced to deal with reality isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it is really grating to see a proposal to harm all current and future members of a community disingenuously dressed up as being done for the benefit of that community. Of course, such PR pretentiousness is merely Wikia again doing what is best for Wikia, without regard to its users. Quizzical 19:35, October 23, 2010 (UTC)

In wondering at the narrower content space for the new look, the *only* two things that make sense are handheld devices, and console-web browsers (eg, the PS3).

I suspect these would be visible in usage stats -- do we know what percentage of traffic to the guildwars wikia is from said devices? If it's low, this would make a fair argument against the new look (which like others I rather detest). Yamagawa 01:28, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

I don't have any numbers, but I can't imagine it being very high, for this wiki or any others. Though we don't really need another argument against the skin, nor the move is not entirely about the skin. It's about Wikia's new policies that severely limit the wikis' freedoms and rights, against the wishes of said wikis. And they've resorted to strong-arm tactics on a few of them, which has got people wondering if they really care about the communities they host. --Macros 04:54, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

My own experiences on wikis that Wikia administers itself made me think that Wikia's ideas of how to run communities differ from ours. --◄mendel► 09:12, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

Wiki used to have a phone skin for monaco, but as far as I've discerned from blog comments of others over on Wikia central, the New Look still doesn't have one. Would anyone care to check and maybe upload a screenshot (if all else fails, a photo of your phone screen)?

I've read on Wall Street Journal that some ad companies track where users click on a page and combine that with an analysis of what they know it's on it; that would be made much easier with that sort of fixed layout as well. (See also w:User:M.mendel/Why Oasis.) --◄mendel► 09:12, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

Talisman Online Wiki have set up shop at curse.com; not surprisingly, since Wynthyst had founded that one. They did some final housekeeping on the Wikia site. As a result, Wikia demoted Wynthyst and Balistic Pve for "acting to damage the wiki" and blocked them for "vandalism", leaving JonTheMon as sole remaining admin. (See [2] and [3]). --◄mendel► 11:53, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

This is really making me wonder what kind of dictatorship is going to take place if we decide to go through with our move... Is there going to be a mass banning of all our admins and bureaucrats as well? How many other wikia wiki's are suffering this complete injustice? (It would be nice if anyone could get a hold of Entropy. Getting her input on this whole debacle would be comforting to some of us, long time contributors) -- Isk8(T/C) 13:55, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

Noting is too surprising about this. But i think making a comment about "dismantling" the wiki wasn't really wise on their part. THough i didn't saw that comment. TulipVorlax - 15:19, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

[4] It looks like Ballistic PVE deleted the Monaco and Monobook .css files and the wiki policies and removed some stuff from the main page. I could understand blocking for that.

But I don't see what Wynthyst did to deserve a block. He rebranded some stuff as Talisman Online@Wikia, and took some comments about the wiki growing off of the main page. His other recent edits look like normal work from a good (meaning, not vandalism) editor. Sannse doesn't seem to see what Wynthyst did to deserve a block, either, as his comments are so generic that they could easily be a copy and paste justification that he gives to 50 different people. Quizzical 15:56, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

Deleting the Monaco.css does nothing, since Monaco is no longer an option. Deleting monobook.css doesn't damage anything since it merely returns the skin to its default configuration; it's like applying a coat of whitewash to the flat you're vacating so it's nice for the next tenant who may not like your choice of wallpaper. (In fact, GuildWiki's monobook.css doesn't do very much to the skin at all.) The same goes for leaving a set of policies that none of the future community have ever seen before, and that nobody is left to enforce. I'm not sure what really happened to the mainpage, though I assume the intent was similar. I certainly wouldn't call it "vandalism" (the mainpage there still looks nice in any version I've checked), and I'm sure that if they removed something that should have been kept, it would have been no problem to put it back later, or to at least complain and discuss putting it back in.

When I leave a flat, I need to dismantle my shelves, take off the drapes etc. I haven't seen the incriminating comment either, but I think it possible that someone misunderstood what it meant; and even so, thought does not equal action. --◄mendel► 16:42, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

Reading that page, I now believe the demotion and block was inevitable. --◄mendel► 21:14, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

I can see why Wikia would block for saying that. That they'd find that comment when it's off Wikia entirely means they're surely searching for such things.

That said, there's no need to sabotage or "dismantle" a wiki when we leave. The focus ought to be on getting people to move, and making the new GuildWiki as good as possible. If GuildWars Wikia still has our data slowly decaying (e.g., from random, mandatory skin changes that no one does the massive work to accommodate) and becoming obsolete from benign neglect, so what? If it gets slowly overrun with the random vandals and spammers that we've reverted and blocked in the past, that's not our problem once we leave. But if people don't know that GuildWiki has moved, then that would be a big problem.

It's interesting to note that, while Wikia did revert some changes for their wiki on Talisman Online, the announcement of the move is still up on the main page. Quizzical 06:25, October 22, 2010 (UTC)

I read the MSN log (and all the related discussion above) from Felix and Dr Ishmael's conversation with Donna and Donovan from Curse, and it all sounded great. They appear to be very supportive, and I think the move will be a positive one. However, I'd like to point out something about GWGuru. Anyone who's spent any time on the Guru forums knows that - historically - they've been somewhat undependable at times when faced with heavy traffic. In my experience, that fact hasn't changed at all since Guru was acquired by Curse. The only difference being that instead of an endlessly hanging page, you now get a Curse.com error message. I'm no tech guy, so I can't comment on possible reasons for load errors. It's entirely possible that it's related to the forum software rather than their servers. But if it is server-related, maybe Donovan's comments regarding their "cluster of super servers" and how GuildWiki's traffic would be a "drop in the bucket" should be taken with a grain of salt. jimbo321talk 16:39, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

We're going to move to Curse.com, and we're going to get them to buy www.guildwiki.org for us. I'll send the request once Blizzcon is over. If anyone has earth-shattering objections, voice them now. 21:39, October 23, 2010 (UTC)

No objections, but I would like to thank you folks for sorting out this mess and getting everything organized. Hopefully, all of our editors and lurkers will make the move when it happens, and maybe with fewer ads (a complaint that I've heard more than once about Wikia), GuildWiki will expand it's audience and end up even better than it is now. cheers :) jimbo321talk 06:54, October 24, 2010 (UTC)

Nice. Let me know by tossing me a talk page message once the new wiki is up and running. :) -- (gem / talk) 04:47, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

I'll have a bot script that will post on everyone's talk page. :D Well, not exactly everyone, but everyone who has contributed in the past 6 months or so. —Dr Ishmael 05:36, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

Which, conveniently, will include all the long-time lurkers that posted on the Letter to Wikia. :) 05:49, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

It was all part of the plan. --Vipermagi 09:38, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

On my part, i just already have a fav on the given URL and i try it out every day or so. Tulip. 10:52, October 27, 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, favorited the www.guildwiki.org URL, checking it every day or so along with the new pvxwiki URL... patiently awaiting the "wiki-rapture".

There's really no point in checking the URL like that. It's not going to point to the wiki until the wiki is 100% ready, and at that point I'm going to bot-spam everyone's talk pages to let you know anyway. Also, you're just generating more ad revenue for Martin right now. So just leave the URL alone and keep checking the wiki here for announcements. —Dr Ishmael 21:45, October 27, 2010 (UTC)

Would Wikia object to us putting a direct link on the project page, and leaving a link to the project page in the sitenotice? I know a direct link in the sitenotice is out of the question. Or was that foregone conclusion already, and I'm just being paranoid about Wikia going on an "anti-advertising-competitor-sites" rampage. --Macros 00:24, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

It's not at all out of the question. 00:28, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

They will remove it if you do that. However, do what WoWWiki did. Create a "fansite" article talking about the new site, and link to the new page in the article. Then post the article on the main page. That's the only way they won't remove it, and they have no grounds to remove it because it's like linking to any other GW fansite (or GW.com itself).

Also, Mr. Dr. Ishmael, get me that bot code to leave messages on everyone's page. We'd like to use it at PvX as well with one of our bots. KarateJesus21:27, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't believe wikia will remove it the way I'm planning it. 22:01, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

There's no need to request a notification, since it looks like we'll be pinging every single user who has ever contributed to GuildWiki (see discussion below). —Dr Ishmael 20:54, November 2, 2010 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Narrow page means more use of the old ri template. Is it necessary to only have recent contributors? I don't see it being too annoying if it goes out to all users. I'm sure there are readers who don't edit that much anymore or only infrequently. Just make sure you use a bot. Tired of you clogging up RC, Ishy. =P. I'd offer to help with stuff, but Ishy always seems to think of everything. —♥Jedi♥Rogue♥ 20:10, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

If you think of anything I missed or an easier way to do it, please let me know. I especially wish there were a better way of getting the user list, but oh well.

After playing around with ListUsers a bit more, it looks like the "No group" designation is only applied to users who have actually edited on GuildWiki, so there's essentially no difference between setting Contributed: to "all users" vs. "1 or more edits." The difference comes when you pick whether to sort by last login or last edit. I've edited my post above to reflect this.

I'm also in favor of pinging all recent users, rather than only recent contributors. Even with all this discussion about the move and the letter and everything, there's going to be a lot of people who just don't want to edit, for whatever reason. The only issue here is that "last login" is Wikia-wide, so we'll be pinging users who maybe edited here once a couple years ago and never visited again, but still visit other Wikia wikis. This probably isn't a big deal, though.

That leaves the time period for selecting users. Doing 3 months would net just over 1000 users, while 6 months would be a bit more than 1500. Heck, if we did 1 year, which wouldn't be completely crazy, that would be about 2200. I don't really have any preference on this myself. —Dr Ishmael 20:34, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

The more the better imo. 21:42, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

We should definitely ask anyone who can read or listen to get the word out about the change once the new site is live. --◄mendel► 23:21, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

Spam in LA and Kamadan? Lol. Make a guild and hold halls for a few hours? Why are we limiting ourselves to only recent users? I hadn't contributed for a while before this and even if I hadn't started again, I would want to know. Its not like we are spamming people's inboxes here.—♥Jedi♥Rogue♥ 01:12, October 30, 2010 (UTC)

Well, teeeeeeeeechnically... by posting on talkpages we are generating email notifications... as long as the user didn't turn that setting off. So we should do this for all ~15,000 users, is that what you're saying? /sigh At least I realized a quicker way of getting the usernames, using the WebDevloper extension to copy the generated table (also to make it list 1000 users per page), then a Perl script to parse that as XML. —Dr Ishmael 03:49, October 30, 2010 (UTC)

I'm all for notifying active posters that the site is moving via email. I'm all for notifying all users on their talk pages that the site is moving. I will however say that I am opposed to sending email notifications out to all users. There is informed email for people who may want to be in the loop, and there is spamming everyone regardless of their possible interest. Spamming all users, I'll have to stand against. Yamagawa 23:43, October 30, 2010 (UTC)

Having talk page edits send you a notification e-mail is a user-set preference, so we're not really in control of who gets e-mails or not. 02:59, October 31, 2010 (UTC)

A point, but is it the default preference to notify the user? Further, is the user required to enter & verify their email address for some actions? I get notifications from a couple software companies I use the software of, and I did no more there than I did here -- provide an email address where required. That doesn't stop me from thinking of their notifications and such as spam. Yes, make an effort to get the word out, but please don't overdo it. Yamagawa 03:53, October 31, 2010 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Yamagawa, there's a difference between spamming and receiving a single mail.--El_Nazgir 10:33, October 31, 2010 (UTC)

We are sending a single mail to hundreds of users. This would definitely be spamming if it was unsolicited. However, to receive this notification, you would have had to enter your email address when creating the account (or add it to your profile later), and confirm it. Giving an email address or confirming it is by no means required to have an account, so providing a confirmed email address probably counts as consent to receiving these notifications. There's consensus here that the importance of this change merits a talkpage notice for these users (the first in years if ever), so it certainly merits an email for those who have chosen to receive them.

The matter would be different if we could be assured to have a notice displayed in a prominent place on the wiki for some time (months?), but experience shows that Wikia doesn't tolerate a site-notice style announcement for more than a week or two. --◄mendel► 11:51, October 31, 2010 (UTC)

The Special:SignUp used to say the email was optional; it no longer does, but it now implies it is required; however, it is not actually required (see Special:EmailUser/Testy_mctest_42). They also dropped the box where you could optionally enter your name so your contributions would be properly credited to you. WTF? Notice: This is Wikia WTF #376 - 378. --◄mendel► 11:54, October 31, 2010 (UTC)

Mendel, I would say I was surprised, but I am not... // Someone who hasn't visited the site in 3 years probably will care more about the existence of the message than the content. I'll withdraw the objection, just don't overdo things. Yamagawa 16:35, October 31, 2010 (UTC)

This is an automated notice based on your preferences settings at
GuildWiki. See the links at the bottom of this message to change your
preferences. Do not reply to this email, this is not a monitored email
account.

It is obvious that this notification needs to have a concise edit summary, ideally giving the new site name; should we also create a special username so that we may have the message in the Subject of the email? --◄mendel► 10:24, October 31, 2010 (UTC)
These texts are stored in MediaWiki:Enotif_subject and MediaWiki:Enotif_body. --◄mendel► 10:44, October 31, 2010 (UTC)

Note: the talkpage notification, if we do it, should serve two purposes:

to advise editors of the fork

to make them aware that GuildWars Wikia is reorienting itself, and to make past and present contributors curious and interested in taking part in this process

Thus, the notice should hopefully recruit more community for both forks, making it a win-win. --◄mendel► 10:01, November 12, 2010 (UTC)

If you want to, feel free to go ahead and write the notice. As well as the replacements for the email components. You can probably do a much better than I can. —Dr Ishmael 15:23, November 12, 2010 (UTC)

I've played with this over the past couple days, and it works great. The catch is that the author's wiki, Absurdopedia, only has 1/8 of the edits that we have and 1/4 of the files. So what took him 6 hours to back up is going to take us closer to 48 hours. Luckily, the text-dump script can be run incrementally (the API indexes revisions sequentially on revision ID), so we can re-run it to catch all edits that were made during those 48 hours. The image-dump script can't be run incrementally, though (API indexes images alphabetically on filename), so when we start we'll need to post a site notice asking users not to upload anything (or if they do, they'll have to re-upload at the new site). —Dr Ishmael 17:43, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

Per KJ's suggestion above, I've written a draft "fansite" page for GuildWiki. Feel free to make improvements to it - we'll insert the URL, date, etc., and move it to mainspace after we fork. —Dr Ishmael 23:26, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

Would it make sense to request a change in our project namespace to no longer say "GuildWiki:"? (while keeping GuildWiki: as an alias to prevent links everywhere from borking). -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 20:30, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

What would it change to? GuildWarsWikia? GuildWikia?—♥Jedi♥Rogue♥ 20:41, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

If the "@" is a legal character in namespace, I would propose GuildWars Wikia, matching what we are now using elsewhere as sitename. -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 20:43, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that would make perfect sense. Options we had bandied about on irc are GuildWarsWikia: or GWWikia:; if an @ is feasible, that would make two more options. I anticipate taking a poll here after the forked community has left, so bring on ideas if you like them to be included. I wouldn't want to keep GuildWiki: , we can just bot them all to Project: before the renaming, and nothing ought to break. --◄mendel► 22:21, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Please let's not bot anything until after the fork, otherwise that'll be thousands of additional revisions that have be backed up/restored (on top of 1.3M revisions already, it's not much, but still). I think mendel's edit of "before the move" to "before the renaming" (which caused the EC) probably made this point moot, anyway. —Dr Ishmael 22:27, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

Not sure if this belongs here but I figured anyone watching this page would want to know that the Monobook skin is now available in your Preferences. Also not sure if this is anything new but I couldn't figure out how to change the skin after they forced the new one on us. Makes looking at the site more bearable until the move is complete. Kittykar 09:19, November 6, 2010 (UTC)

Monobook has always been available on GuildWiki. It's just hard to reach your preferences on Oasis. 09:33, November 6, 2010 (UTC)

How to see the wiki like it was:

Go to Special:Preferences; on the first User Profile tab, scroll down to Site Layouts. Change the radio button to Monobook. Scroll all the way down, click the "save" button.

{{SITENAME}} right now says "GuildWiki". Are we in consensus to make a request to Wikia staff to change the sitename to "GuildWars Wikia"? -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 23:04, November 10, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, but after the move (which I hope won't take much longer) --El_Nazgir 23:22, November 10, 2010 (UTC)

The sitename is a parameter that is set in the base wiki configuration, which can not be backed up from "outside" (only Wikia employees have access to that). Having Wikia change it now will not affect the sitename at the new wiki.

I am also in agreement on the new name for the wiki hosted on Wikia. —Dr Ishmael 23:32, November 10, 2010 (UTC)

I suggest this plan:

get the fork over with

"neutralize" Project: namespace

meanwhile, get consensus for a new namespace name (I agree with El Nazgir that consensus about the site name has already been demonstrated)

ask Wikia staff to rename Project: namespace and change the wiki name

It makes sense to me to request this together, since it's either both or none.

I also believe that Wikia staff is now highly suspicious of requests made to them by what they perceive as the "old" community; on other wikis Sannse has repeatedly asked for the "new community" to set the policy for the Wikia fork, so I don't rate our chances high if we request this now. --◄mendel► 23:37, November 10, 2010 (UTC)

Do we have any date estimates on when we'll get the split (I don't feel like calling it a "fork") over with? Or is it purely on a "it'll be done when it's done" basis? -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 00:08, November 11, 2010 (UTC)

Ah, we're ontopic again (I feel the sitename discussion would be better placed on the "future" forum). Curse techs have been busy getting Wowpedia to work; we should profit by the experience they have gathered thereby when they get around to setting our wiki up. I hope Felix knows more, he's our curse.com liaison bureaucrat. --◄mendel► 00:50, November 11, 2010 (UTC)

Just heard from Bryan that they're hoping to have our server ready on Monday. If everything goes smoothly (har-dee-har), we might be moved by the end of next week. —Dr Ishmael 01:06, November 11, 2010 (UTC)

First of all thank you for moving from wikia, I started playing GW about this time that the change happened, I thought maybe the site was in dis use, and was very sad, but then I realized all my other wikia wiki's were god afull also moving to curse is great for ONE reason because curse is one of the fastest growing sites out there for gaming, and is THE BIGGEST wow site out there at least for add on's.
Also when I went on the main page today there was a video ad partially covering the move annoucement's how bad is that, and my screen is 1360x780 this new forced page size hurts my eyes with the ugly dots. Hope to become a strong editor after the movePaul Fontaine 05:45, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

Egad. That's awful. Initially, it made it look like pages had been severely vandalized. I hadn't looked into it before, but figured that the change was being made just because Wikia forcing random changes on us was obnoxious. But this basically constitutes Wikia vandalizing their own wikis.

Regardless of the browser size, we get about 660 pixels of width for content. That includes sidebars. The rest of the browser window is filled with a combination of random useless junk and empty space. I could understand if it were advertisements, as Wikia would be trying to get revenue. But a lot of it is random junk that looks useless even to Wikia.

I'm not sure what sort of wikis Wikia had in mind when they created this skin. But it's pretty clear that they don't want game documentation type of stuff here, as they make it unusable for that. Maybe they're hoping to become a blogging site, as the narrow content space with lots of scrolling down is reminiscent of that.

And then, they really, really want people to see Oasis. It's not just the default while logged out, but the log in function is malfunctioning. Again.

I had previously figured that GuildWiki was moving, but I'd probably still post on some other Wikia wikis for other games. Now that looks like it may not be a viable option, as Wikia seems to want to be rid of such wikis. Maybe they're losing money on them and want to stop the bleeding, or something like that. Quizzical 20:44, November 28, 2010 (UTC)